The Radetzky March - Softcover

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"A masterpiece.... The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. No other contemporary writer, not excepting Thomas Mann, has come so close to achieving the wholeness--lying atop a slippery pole we never stop trying to climb--that Lukács cites as our impossible aim." --Nadine Gordimer

The Radetzky March, first published in 1932, is Joseph Roth's greatest literary achievement, a novel of world literary rank. Spanning three generations of the Trotta family and set in the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, the novel unfolds with marvelous subtlety to reveal its splendidly modern ironies. In this new translation, Joachim Neugroschel captures the uniquely Rothian tone of the original--profound and elegant seriousness meshed with a tender sense of irony. One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century and an essential novel for our time, The Radetzky March is still breathtaking and still brilliant.

Joseph Roth was born in 1894, in a small Galician town on the eastern border of the Hapsburg Empire. He served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian Army and later worked as a journalist in Vienna, Berlin and Frankfurt. In 1933, he moved to Paris, where, upset by events in Europe and by his personal problems, he drank excessively, dying in Paris in 1939 from pneumonia and heart failure brought on by the withdrawal symptoms during a delerium tremens spell. One of the central figures in the émigré intellectual opposition to the Nazis, Joseph Roth is the author of fifteen novels and novellas and a large body of journalism. He is, along with Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, among the greatest of the early twentieth century Central European writers.