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JOSEPH ROTH AND "THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE CAPRICES OF WORLD HISTORY"

June 29, 2008 on 3:26 am | In Books, Globalization, History | No Comments

The Collected Shorter Fiction of

Joseph Roth

by Joseph Roth (Author)

Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Product Details: Paperback: 256 pages Publisher: Granta Books (October 17, 2002) ISBN-10: 1862075387 ISBN-13: 978-1862075382

As you read the “Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth”, you’ll marvel at his language – his remarkable talent for using simple words to evoke pictures and feelings deep in your mind. Consider, for instance, “…the perfumed lilac breathed, the blackbirds sang, the month of May came giggling out of the undergrowth…” from `The Honors Student’, the very first story in his collection. Or, “The woodpeckers were already hammering at the trees. It rained a lot…” his opening sentences from `Strawberries’ – another touching tale. And, like me, you’ll discover the world of Joseph Roth, thanks largely to Michael Hofmann’s translation.

There are seventeen stories in this collection, all of them wonderfully entertaining. A few of them are long enough to be novellas, but that’s a bonus. Roth writes about small towns, men living in the past, women compelled to wasting their years, and childhoods cut short by necessity. His characters are so real that you’ll feel you might have known some of them, sometime in your life. Each story is a touch melancholic, sometimes even tragic. But his words seem to live on forever.

What you’ll also find running through Roth’s stories is an obsession with the past, or at least, a preoccupation with maintaining status quo. Perhaps, it’s a reflection of his own inability in accepting the changes in his life: World War I, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the rise of nationalism and Nazi Germany.

A point he clearly laments in `The Bust of the Emperor’: “They are no longer content to be divided into peoples, no! – it seems they’re hell-bent on belonging to different nations. Nationalism – get this, Solomon?! – Not even monkeys could have come up with that one.”

But melancholy and his obsession with the past are not the only elements that drive these stories. Roth weaves in humour too. Take for instance this description from `Barbara’: “He patted Barbara’s cheeks, and it felt to her like five little piglets scrabbling over her face.” Or, this passage in `The Triumph of Beauty’: “She fell to her knees and kissed my friend’s toe-caps. He couldn’t fight her off. She slapped him as well. Then, she collapsed on the floor, lifeless as a doll. It wasn’t possible to lift her up. She seemed to be welded to the carpet.”

Joseph Roth’s words are wonderfully simple, his descriptions vivid, and his stories, entertaining. A touch melancholic perhaps, but a delightful collection.

It is quite a puzzle that the author of such works as The Radetzky March, Job and Rebellion remains largely unknown to so many English-speaking readers – and even those well acquainted with modern European literature, and the likes of Thomas Mann. Several wonderful translators – not least of them, the poet Michael Hoffman – are helping to correct this sorry situation. Hoffman’s rendition of The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth is the latest service in a great cause, as it shows Roth also had a gift for short fiction. With his characteristic lyricism, and precise depiction of conflicted, and all-too-human characters, Roth creates several more memorable stories. Anyone familiar with Roth’s work might recognize the haunting Stationmaster Fallmerayer, as this is perhaps the best known work in this collection. Certainly they will recognize Stationmaster as vintage Roth, once read, as it is redolent of the writer’s unique ability to capture the simple tragedy of simple lives, sensitively, but without sentimentality. The same can be said of The Bust of the Emperor, which contains echoes of the novel The Emperor’s Tomb. A particular favourite of mine was Barbara, the responsible mother, “Didn’t the name sound like hard labor”, who knows responsibility to her son, but perhaps not to herself. How many writers, Chekhov aside, can distil with such poignancy a character’s whole emotional life in a mere eight brief pages?

“The incomprehensible caprices of

world history.”

The Bust of the Emperor” (1935) belongs squarely to Roth’s ultraconservative phase. Set in Galicia immediately after the World War, it concerns the quixotic Count Franz Xaver Morstin, who, despite the fact that his homeland now belongs to Poland, keeps a bust of Emperor Franz Joseph in front of his residence and goes around in the uniform of an Austrian cavalry officer. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who takes it as his task to commemorate this obscure, low-key protest against the course of history.

The narrator wastes no time in giving us his opinion of modern times. In the course of the nineteenth century, he observes caustically, it was discovered that “every individual had to be a member of a particular race or nation”:

All those people who had never been anything other than Austrians…began, in compliance with the “order of the day,” to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the German, the Romanian, the Slovenian, the Croatian “nation.”

Roth clearly laments ethno-nationalism in `The Bust of the Emperor’:

“They are no longer content to be divided into peoples, no! – it seems they’re hell-bent on belonging to different nations. Nationalism – get this, Solomon?! – Not even monkeys could have come up with that one.”

Among the few who continued to regard themselves as “beyond nationality” was Count Morstin.

Before the war the count used to have some kind of social role as mediator between the local people and the state bureaucracy. Now he is without power or influence. Yet the villagers