Description
Essays from France 1925-1939
Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. Translated and collected together here for the first time in English, the exhilarating pieces in Report from a Parisian Paradise evoke, in a tone of lucid excitement, a world of suppleness, beauty, and promise. So prophetic, so trenchant, so ultimately haunting were Roth’s perceptions of a world where “the girls became more lost than ever,” that he resorted increasingly to drink to douse his vision of a conflagration that could not be averted. From the port town of Marseille to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon, from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, Roth’s book is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work filled with a transcendent philosophical clarity. 40 illustrations.
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published several books and articles before his untimely death at the age of 44. Roth’s writing has been admired by J. M. Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elie Wiesel, and Nadine Gordimer, among many others. The poet Michael Hofmann has won numerous prizes for his German translations.
