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Translated from the German by David Le Vay
Weights and Measures was the third Roth novel to be translated
into English and one of the the last he wrote, as he drank
himself to death in unhappy exile in France. It is a fable
about the disintegration of a good man.
At the insistence
of his wife, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman
in the Austro-Hungarian army for a civilian job as the Inspector
of Weights and Measures in a remote territory near the Russian
border.
Attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade
duties he is at a loss in a world of smugglers, profiteers
and small crooks. Eibenschutz soon finds he can no longer
distinguish law from justice. When he discovers that his
wife is pregnant by his own clerk, he spends more time away
from home. Spending his hours at the border tavern, he find
himself hopelessly drawn to a beautiful gypsy woman, Euphemia.
But she is prepared to share the bed of the landlord and
Eibenshutz’s
enemy, Jadlowker, an unprincipled profiteer who has made
the tavern a beacon for local smuggling activity . . .
‘This small novel is a masterpiece.’ — Angela
Huth, Listener
‘Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading
pleasure . . . A haunting little book, touched by genius.’
— Robert Nye, Guardian
‘A masterly performance.’ — Paul Bailey, Evening
Standard
‘An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with
a physical immediacy in the prose . . . I want to read more.’
— New Statesman
‘Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol
. . . passages of electrifying beauty.’ — The
Times
JOSEPH ROTH was
born in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1894 and
fought in the Austrian army during the First World War.
He worked as a journalist in Frankfurt before leaving Germany
for France in 1933. He died in Paris in 1939. He also wrote The
Radetzky March, String of Pearls, The Silent
Prophet and The
Legend of the Holy Drinker. |
