The Radetzky March [antikvár]

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION T "f/ie Radetzky March has a prominence in the work of the Austrian noveHst Joseph Roth that is magnificent and entirely merited, and yet still troubling. Like any great book, it distorts its author. The novel is taken, almost reflexively, as tantamount or equivalent to Roth. In a game of literary consequences, if A. says Joseph Roth, B. says The Radetzky March. Most people who have read Roth have read it, and most who have read it have stopped there. I spoke out of exasperation, but I think truthfully, when I remarked that the consensus on Roth is that he is 'a one-book author with fourteen or however many titles to his name'. It can seem a lot to ask, but one should remember that The Radetzky March has a crown around it. Roth came to write The Radetzky March in the autumn of 1930. After a string of restless, contemporary, occasionally satirical books {Zeitromane) that led ultimately to his brief commitment to documentary fiction - Neue Sachlichkeit — in Flight Without End (subtitled A Report) in 1927 and Right and Left in 1929, he found himself dissatisfied, and in a sort of hterary cul-de-sac. Indicative of this is the fact that one more book of this sort, Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois, remained a fragment, as did the remarkable Strawberries (included in The Collected Shorter Fiction). Roth ended up by