Beware of Pity

Reprinted with a new cover in B format for the fourth time due to popular demand, Beware Of Pity is a powerful novel which explores the complex hidden recesses of emotion. In 1913, a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers of pity and eventually flees from them into the battlefield. His involvement begins with a faux pas: he had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance. Paying her an occasional afternoon call seemed to give him a new sense of purpose and he did not notice how imperceptibly bound up with tenderness his concern might be. The girl's face brightened, her father doted, the young man's self-esteem rose. But he was gradually to learn that pity, like morphia, is only a first solace to the invalid and unless one knows the exact dosage, and when to stop, it can become a virulent poison. Beware of Pity is Stefan Zweig's only novel and is a devastatingly sober realisation of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, set against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.