FLIGHT WITHOUT END

Joseph Roth

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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.