Joseph Roth

Starred review from September 12, 2011
Prolific, peripatetic, prickly, and best known in his time as a journalist, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) has since taken his place beside Thomas Mann (whom he loathed), Robert Musil (whom he disliked almost as much), and Alfred Döblin among the giants of 20th-century German and Austrian literature. English readers will find a tormented, perennial fist-shaker in the more than 450 letters by Roth, from 1911 to 1939 (a few addressed to him), skillfully translated and nimbly edited by Hofmann, and previously only available in a 40-year-old German-language collection. Though at times gossipy, with opinions on everyone from Thomas Mann to Austrian publishers and his own Jewish background, Roth reveals himself detesting Hitlerism early and to such a degree that from the dawn of 1933 he left Germany permanently. To his good friend and fellow writer Stefan Zweig, the recipient of many of the letters, Roth wrote, “The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.” Roth was also no fan of Soviet communism. Alcohol addiction left Roth (The Radetzky March) in increasing desperation. Perhaps fittingly, Roth died at the edge of the world calamity he had projected.

November 1, 2011
The doomed world of interwar Europe comes to burning life in the anguished correspondence of the peripatetic Austrian novelist/journalist. Roth (1894–1939) was one of the best-known, highest-paid journalists writing in German during the 1920s and '30s. He was also a superb novelist, a terrible drunk, an implacable enemy and an impossible friend, qualities that all leap off the pages of this collection. Perfectly translated by poet Hofmann (who should have left the footnotes to someone with a more systematic mind), Roth's manic letters chronicle a life led from café table to hotel room to train station, scribbling articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung in between the series of novels that made his reputation. The pace was unsustainable, as were Roth's finances. He was forever borrowing against advances and begging for money from better-heeled friends like the long-suffering Stefan Zweig, a more successful author who had--they both knew--less talent than Roth. It remains a mystery how the disorderly Roth found time to toss off these letters of coruscating brilliance, featuring trenchant, prescient analyses of the Nazi threat at a time when most of his fellow Jewish intellectuals were hoping it would blow over in a few years. A staunch Austrian monarchist who despised communists almost as much as fascists, Roth cut all ties with Germany immediately after the Nazis took power and scathingly criticized anyone, especially anyone Jewish, who tried to compromise with the regime. His correspondence in later years is almost unbearable to read, as he sunk deeper into alcoholism and despair, but his zest for language and his total commitment to literature glow through even the most crazed rantings. It's easy to understand his agony when we read via his letters of an entire humane, cosmopolitan culture being murdered, as Jewish and antifascist writers saw their publications banned, their royalties confiscated and their lives threatened. A quintessential depiction of one man's view from the brink of the abyss.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from January 1, 2012
The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Roth (18941939), a budding writer, sent these thoughts to his cousin Paula in 1917words that took on enormous weight with crushing repercussions as he became an impassioned, incisively observant, renowned, and beleaguered journalist and novelist, crisscrossing Europe with laser eyes, tracking the early warning signs of monstrous catastrophes to come. Award-winning translator Hofmann has been instrumental in stoking new appreciation for Roth's incandescent work (including his masterpiece, The Radetzky March), and now brings his profound fluency in Roth's vision and writing to this accidental autobiography-in-letters, providing invaluable background and analysis in his refulgent commentary. In 457 arresting letters, Roth, a man of torrential talent, energy, and soul, blazes forth in all his fiery insight, prescience, wit, rage, and despair, chronicling a world succumbing to the apocalyptic spell of the Third Reich. Hardworking and hard-drinking, forever broke, embattled, and ill, Roth badgers editors and publishers, coos to admirers, and bellows, begs, whines, and confides to the famous and wealthy writer Stefan Zweig, Roth's most generous and loyal ally and complete opposite. No letter collection is more intense nor more revealing of the anguished and heroic artistic struggle to confront horror with truth and beauty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)