Pet Shop Boys and Post-Office Girls

Today brings an endorsement from an unexpected place: the disco floor. Neil Tennant's latest post on The Pet Shop Boys site reads:

Just finished reading this beautiful, fast-moving, tragic novel, The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. It was written in the early 30s but has only just been published in English. I think it will haunt me for a long while. Highly recommended (as are many other works by this under-rated writer).

And he even links to The Nation review of the book.

Now if we could only find out if, in the lyrics to West End Girls, the band is actually referring to the Edmund Wilson history of 19th and 20th century radical revolutions, when they sing:

In every country, in every nation
From Lake Geneva To the Finland Station.

or is it just a colloquialism? As a Time article of 1939 explains,

The phrase "to the Finland Station" has a symbolic meaning, implies something like a rendezvous with destiny.

We should also mention that Tess Lewis at The Wall Street Journal also reviewed The Post-Office Girl this past weekend.

Comments

[jasminewok]

Yes it is terrible to be driven into exile.

[dan visel]

I'm pretty sure Neil Tennant did Russian history in college? Russia comes up a fair bit in the Pet Shop Boys, most recently they did a new soundtrack for Battleship Potempkin. I assume he read the Edmund Wilson at some point . . .