Morgan’s Reviews > The World of Yesterday > Status Update

Sometimes Zweig is saccharine, overly romantic and prone to cliches. Panama Canal, the joining of two oceans! Looking into the eyes of someone who looked into Goethe’s eyes once!

Sometimes Zweig allows his nostalgia to override everything else and he gets cheesy, corny, overly romantic in a Hallmark-movie like way about how “good it was back home.” It’s not original. It’s just overwrought. The chapter about talking to an old lady who as a baby was held by Goethe is similar.

I’m just now seeing the real genius of this memoir. Yes, it’s a chronicle of a bygone world. Yes, it has a sad and elegiac character. But the growing up! The Bildungsroman aspect of it, the individual voice of its author coming into his own, regardless of the time and the place but deeply enmeshed in it nonetheless, is the hidden crown of this book. I love Zweig’s voice.