Fantastic Night by Stefan Zweig Book Review
It’s a story that makes us question ourselves from the beginning to the end of an extraordinary night, telling the same story in a different way every moment. There is a person who has tasted all kinds of pleasure and cannot feel any event (even when a gun is pointed at him) and cannot feel any excitement. The story character doesn’t have a name, but I would say that character is today’s society.
We are rarely faced with a real behavior, a real event more and more difficult in our daily lives. Things that were real are now even more rare. Tangible and indispensable things became abstracted and easily discountable things. This abstraction and the things that the” ordinary “ man enjoyed began to become increasingly meaningless and, rather, automated. Automatization is especially described in this book.
The contempt we see when we talk about what ordinary people do is everywhere in our society. People are running away from admitting their own mistakes, people who are trying to change themselves are becoming less and less. This contempt stems from the character thinking that these people don’t know why they’re doing an act. It’s really true for people in horse racing. But according to our character, after his “first offense,” he gets mixed up in the flow of people he despises. So, he becomes one with the people he despises. Maybe this little crime doesn’t make him understand them, but it makes him one with them. The first thing he does after being one with them is to keep doing what he’s doing, not knowing why. This reminds me of automatization in our society. This automatization reminds me of the society in which he was able to do what he wanted when he was a child; then he was automated due to his inability to think about himself, or the external conditions and he was unable to enjoy what he did.
But we don’t see the full reflection of our society in this story. Because our character knows he can’t enjoy what he’s doing and what he’s going to do. He even questions in himself the sadness he couldn’t live with when her girlfriend broke up with her. He wonders why and the limits of this callousness in himself.
Until he found the limit to this callousness and lack of excitement. He finds that limit when he steals unknowingly by himself. Stealing illegal money illegally has a huge impact on itself. He doesn’t even want to touch this money, but once he has a taste of this excitement and disgust, he can’t go back. According to him, he becomes one of those people he just made fun of and despised. He is happy with this transformation, rather than disgusted by it, and even recalls it in every detail, as he says at the beginning of the book.
Does this story tell us that it is comforting and enlightening to be with society? For me it’s the opposite. In horse racing, our character is again proud of what he did and disapproves of what he did. He can’t even get excited or even excited about his action. Sometimes he can’t help but ask himself what I’m doing with these people. Such thoughts also show us that our character is still unable to come out of his shell and has not changed.
In the second part of the book (for me it is second part), we see the real transformation. As I mentioned at first, people are free as children, they have no perception of the future or the past. They only live in this moment. Our character wants to go back to his childhood by going to the amusement park. Every bourgeois had a childhood. It’s not easy coming back to childhood. I think we should have watched the transformation of our character for a few months rather than a day, but Stefan Zweig must have thought the reader would get the original idea, which he completed in a day.
After this transformation, there are events that we would never expect from the character, and this change leads him to reunite with people he considers small. At first, he tries to mingle with the people at the bar, or rather, feel what they feel, but his appearance prevents that feeling. Here, the author tries to explain that appearance does not change with thoughts. This change must be on the inside as well as on the outside, which we see later in the book.
The next thing we’re talking about is a childhood reunion with a merry-go-round at the amusement park.
At the end of this day, the character is with the girl he despises, whom he calls rickety. He’s looking for the limits of crime and self-deprecation. The boundaries we usually see in the story don’t end here, but he wants to humiliate himself even more and sink into crime. What he actually feels is something he hasn’t felt since he was born, being seen as small and destroying his position with a little action.
Our character doesn’t exactly dare to approach the border. This character has lived the limits of bourgeois life, but he limits himself to reaching the limits of committing crime to disgrace his bourgeois friends. He draws a line here.
After this limit is set, a color comes into our character’s life, and now it’s starting to feel real again. So much so that even a smile on a prostitute’s face seems realistic to him and he hugs her.
When I read and read this book, nothing came on my mind but automatization that happening in our lives. Automatization and inability to get any excitement from the action. He’s a scourge on everyone who works in a job he doesn’t like in the 21. Century (and in any other example). If Stefan Zweig had written this story in 21. Century; he would have made a slight change to that story. This change would be for the character not to question the feeling of not being able to receive excitement and not to question the feeling of not being able to receive excitement itself, that is, to feel a complete emotional nothingness. This emotional nothingness is manifested by the lack of value to emotion in our society. I, as a scientist, think that negation of emotions is extremely dangerous, and I often see it in society. Although emotions can be explained by science, our emotions are the great values that guide us in childhood and adulthood. These values should not be denied, and every action should question why this action was taken 21. The man of the century. If this automatization continues like this, emotional emptiness can easily take us into its hands just as it took our character in the first part of the book.
Although it’s a short story, it should teach us a lot. After reading this story, I became engrossed in thoughts about society, and it brought a lot of questions to my mind. I answered some questions with my own background and reading. But a big question lingered in my mind, “is meaning in borders?”.
