The Royal Game ; Amok ; Letter from an Unknown Woman

John Fowles remarks that Zweig has been all but forgotten since his suicide in 1942, but he was, during his lifetime, ''arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.'' The Vienna of Stefan Zweig was a world of bright, brittle superficialities, in which the bourgeoisie ''gradually elevated the eternal business of seeing and being seen to the purpose of their existence.'' To break through the facades of this society, Zweig developed a remarkable literary and psychological method, which is brought to perfection in the long stories that make up this collection. Zweig's method was monomania. His central characters are all men and women possessed by an amour fou or an adolescent hate or an ineradicable guilt or (in the title story) the game of chess. Narrowed by single-mindedness, they become knives which Zweig uses remorselessly to cut through to the dark heart of his superficially glittering world. In ''Letter From an Unknown Woman,'' superbly filmed by Max Ophuls, Zweig gives us a woman destroyed by love. A teen-age girl becomes infatuated with a writer who lives in the apartment across the hall, and she continues to love him throughout her life without his knowing it. She gives herself to him twice, once as a young woman and again years later. 'Amok'' is another powerful variation on mad passion, and ''The Royal Game,'' perhaps the most extraordinary of all these tales, uses the game of chess as a terrifying metaphor for schizophrenia. A prisoner in solitary confinement begins to play an entirely mental game of chess with himself, in which he is obliged to divide his being in two, until this ultrasolipsistic feat brings him close to madness. In Zweig's hands, ''the royal game'' becomes a symbol of the tail-swallowing terrors of the life of the mind. These unique tales possess a resonance and a narrative force that make them compelling.