FLIGHT WITHOUT END
Joseph Roth
Translated from the German by
David Le Vay
· A sharp satire from Joseph Roth,
author of The Radetzky March
· Part of the new look Peter Owen Classics range featuring a logo crafted by graphic design icon Alvin Lustig
In perhaps his most personal
novel, Joseph Roth tells the story of Franz Tunda, an officer in the
Austro-Hungarian army, who disappears in Serbia at the end of the first world
war. After ten years of fighting with the Bolsheviks, affairs with beautiful
communists and eking out a living at the edge of the world, on his eventual
return to his native Austria, Franz Tunda finds the old European order has
vanished and there is no place for him anymore in the new culture that has
taken it’s place. Everywhere he finds himself an outsider, consigned to a life
of social and cultural isolation.
Mirroring Roth’s own experience
of exile, Flight Without End reflects the predicament of the disaffected
intellectual who can find no role for himself in a changed world.
'Among his earlier works are several which put into form both stylistically and politically ominous the convictions Roth had formed about the modern world. Flight Without End is one of these: characteristically abrupt, oblique, ironic and dislocated.'
- Times Literary Supplement
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was born
in Brody, Galacia – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in
Ukraine, the only son of Jewish parents. He studied in Vienna and served in the
Austrian army between 1916 and 1918. After the war he worked for newspapers in
Vienna and Berlin where he established a reputation for himself as a brilliant
and insightful journalist and commentator. As early as 1923 he warned against
the threat of Nazism, travelling extensively not only across Austria and
Germany but all over Eastern Europe and Russia, where he reported on the
effects of the Russian Revolution. In 1933, with his warning about Nazism
unheeded, he left Germany and moved to Paris where he died in exile. He was
author of a number of acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction,
including The Legend of the Holy Drinker, The Radetzky march, Job, The
Silent Prophet, Weights and Measures, Perlefter, The Hundred Days, The
Antichrist and The String of Pearls.
Bibliographic Data | |
Date Published | July 2020 |
Format | Paperback |
ISBN Number | 9780720620986 |
Pages | 176 |