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Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
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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
"[A] scrupulous account ..."
"Unfailingly well-written and informative, Endless Flight is a grand tribute to one of the most discomfiting literary geniuses of the 20th century."
"Some of these synopses can feel a little protracted, but it's these affecting, sometimes hallucinatory portraits of individuals and societies in crisis for which Roth is most remembered, and readers who don't have time to turn to the originals will be grateful for them ..."
"Kieron Pim – using, in the main, secondary sources – brings all the details of this consistently creative but wretched life together in an engrossing fashion, giving all the historical context we might need to understand the flows of European politics at the time."
"This resplendent biography not only opens for us a window into a life unknown, but serves up a mirror inviting us to take a look at our own lives."
"By the end of the 1930s, Roth was a bloated, portly wreck, shuffling along on feet swollen by drink ..."
"Pim's book is a little longer than it needs to be, swollen by multi-page plot summaries of each novel and slow to get off the blocks, but his effort to understand the man in full is profound and the result feels definitive."
"But Endless Flight is unequivocally an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Roth in all his quixotic and maddening complexity."
"One of the very few blemishes on Endless Flight is the sheer length of its plot summaries, many of which feel unnecessary, particularly where Roth's best-known works are concerned ..."
"A claustrophobic epic, a portrait of the artist as a portrait of his age ..."
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