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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
"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."
"Keiron Pim's is the first English-language biography of Roth, and what a superb book it is – impeccably researched, extremely readable and, it must be said, grimly relevant in the wake of Putin's assault on Ukraine."
"[A] fine biography, with [a] spirited, shrewd, thorough understanding of its times."
"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 ..."
"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."
"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 captures Roth's perpetual motion, his nostalgia and premonitions, his wrestling with the currents of a disastrous age."
"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 ..."
"But that's a minor complaint."
"Pim also carefully navigates Roth's complex politics and Habsburg nostalgia."
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