The Perfection of Things

In 1941, the popular Austrian Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, with his young wife, Lotte Altmann, went into hiding from the Nazis in Brazil, where less than six months later they committed suicide in a final act of despair. The Perfection of Things is a novel that opens in February of 2004 in the Brazilian town of Petrópolis where a dying American biographer, Adam Ribeira, has been living in a last, desperate effort to complete a critical biography of Zweig, which he has been writing in frustr...