Was Stefan Zweig enough of a twitthat we shouldn't read his work?

That seems to be the basis of Michael Hoffman's argument that we should all stop reading Zweig's work. Though he adds, by way of buttressing his case, that Zweig was a shameless fame-hound and suckup, and among Zweig's contemporaries, those whom we (presumably) most admire, including Thomas Mann, found Zweig's work saccharine and pedestrian both.

Hmm... I re-read Letter from an Unknown Woman not long ago, and quite liked it. The story was well-crafted, the characters - the protagonist, and her addressee - appealing and interesting, and the tragedy presented in nicely understated fashion. Was it pompous and over-written, like much of Mann's work, or obvious and sophomoric, like many of the plays and stories of Brecht, another Zweig-hater cited, approvingly, by Hoffman? No, and for that, it's aged much better. I loved Mann's work when I read it in college - indeed, I read nearly everything he wrote, not just because I was a German lit major, but because I was so taken by its combination of ornate style, minutely detailed, pointed descriptions, and air of general importantness. I tried to read Buddenbrooks a while back and couldn't get ten pages into it, stymied by all the same qualities. Zweig was perhaps a smaller writer, or one whose ambitions - in the sense of the topics he treated - were much smaller. That's certainly to his benefit now, on the page - which seems not to matter much to Hoffman. So what if he was a twit. I'll give Beware of Pity a go, and see if I still feel that way after reading it.