| Synopsis: |
Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth s calamitous life his father s madness, his wife s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris. Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs. " |