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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
"And now, more than ever, is the time to read him."
"What elevates Endless Flight, beyond the pathos of its narrative, is Pim's discussion of Roth's writing."
"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 ..."
"[Roth's] ingenious, tormented life is chronicled in English for the first time in Keiron Pim's biography, Endless Flight — so comprehensive that it will be the authoritative account of Roth's life for decades."
"A remarkable work of detection and empathy."
"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."
"With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning ..."
"But Endless Flight is unequivocally an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Roth in all his quixotic and maddening complexity."
"[A] fine biography, with [a] spirited, shrewd, thorough understanding of its times."
"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."
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