Home › Books › Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
by
89/99
Critics' Rating Index
70/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
95/99
Volume of Reviews
22/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of the World War II. With keen insight, rigor and sensitivity, Keiron Pim delivers a visceral portrait of Roth's internal restlessness and search for belonging, from his childhood in the town of Brody to his Vienna years and his unsettled roaming of Europe. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, and his attitude to his Jewishness, Roth's biography has particular relevance to us now, not only in the growing recognition and revival of his works, but also because his life's trajectory speaks powerfully to us in a time of uncertainty, fear, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.
Reviews
"Pim, though an unlikely contender for a Roth biographer (his first published book was about dinosaurs), proves a sensitive, judicious and perceptive guide."
"His analysis of Roth's novels is clear and convincing, free of fanciful conjecture."
"A remarkable work of detection and empathy."
"Another gripe is the long plot summaries of each of the novels, which seem unnecessary since they've all been recently published in English."
"We are left in no doubt that the forces that rended Roth's world are still active in ours."
"With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning ..."
"His research empowers him to be rigorously sceptical of a writer who was an unreliable historian of both the empire and his own life, telling outrageous lies about his war record, his education, his birthplace and, most significantly, his family."
"Pim does a fine job of making his subject's progress through the world legible ..."
"Such minor quibbles notwithstanding, Pim has given us an authoritative and long-overdue life of an author whose pertinence to our contemporary times is both indisputable and unsettling."
"Endless Flight is a welcome aid for people like me who can't read Roth, or his critics and biographers, in German, and for any English-language readers who might want an introduction to his work."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!