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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
"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 ..."
"With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning ..."
"Pim captures Roth's perpetual motion, his nostalgia and premonitions, his wrestling with the currents of a disastrous age."
"The story is staggeringly depressing."
"[A] fine biography, with [a] spirited, shrewd, thorough understanding of its times."
"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."
"The urge to give linear structure to a life that so often reeled and stumbled is understandable."
"The sheer weight of the material at times drags down the momentum of Pim's narrative, and lengthy plot summaries of Roth's novels fail to illuminate what makes these works so mesmerisingly original."
"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."
"And now, more than ever, is the time to read him."
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