‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann

A transcendental story of a hopeless alcoholic drinking himself to death, written by a genius who was in the final stages of drinking himself to death. Joseph Roth, clear-eyed chronicler of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of Nazism, is one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers, and his work has almost all been translated by the brilliant poet Michael Hofmann. I don’t think that there’s a writer/translator pairing I love more.

First published in English, in a different translation, by Chatto & Windus, 1989. Hofmann’s translation published by Granta, 2000

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth, translated by David le Vay

I didn’t know this story by Joseph Roth until I wrote his biography, which was published by Granta last year titled Endless Flight (oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s out in paperback this October…). This novella is one of his later works, published in 1937 when he was in an advanced state of alcoholism. As his mental health declined Roth increasingly retreated from his agonising present into a fictional world based on his childhood in a little town in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, now in Ukraine. His friend Stefan Zweig remarked with this book’s publication that it was a marvel his talent was so intact, and it ‘almost looks as if he could be saved’. He couldn’t; Roth would die two years later in Paris. This is one of his minor works, but still brilliant. As I say in my book:

“Weights and Measures hasn’t the depth and heft of The Radetzky March nor the emotional clout of Job, but it is precise, lucid, immersive in its evocation of the little town and devastating in its depiction of a virtuous man’s collapse into drink-sodden obsession.”

Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian Army at his wife’s behest (by this stage in the increasingly misogynistic Roth’s life, his male characters’ lives are usually derailed by women), to become the inspector of weights and measures in the border town of Szwaby. The vacancy arose with the death of a well-loved inspector, held in such esteem by the traders because he was too drunk to do the job properly. Eibenschütz intends to bring law and order to this town of dubious traders, who defraud their customers by using false weights on their scales, and immediately meets with suspicion. He makes an enemy in tavern landlord Leibusch Jadlowker, and so the story proceeds to its gripping conclusion. This is Roth’s childhood world distilled into 100 pages with a superb lightness of touch.

First published in German as Der Falsche Gewicht, 1937. First published in English translation in 1982 by Peter Owen; currently available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2017

‘Strawberries’ by Joseph Roth

The One That Got Away:

If you haven’t already read ‘The Radetzky March’ go away, do that now, then come back and thank me. Actually you should probably read ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ while you’re at it, too. But then, then read this.

The first 1,000 words or so are available here, but that’s only an extract from the much longer piece, which is itself only an extract of a planned novel that Roth never finished before his death, and which is very much our loss.

The story, or what there is of it, describes life in a small town very much like the one where Roth grew up, on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century – a town so criminal and insane that it feels like a cross between Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don’t think anyone had papers where I came from. There was a law court, a prison, lawyers, tax offices—but there wasn’t anywhere where you had to identify yourself. What did it matter who you were arrested as, if they arrested you? If you paid taxes or not—whom did it drive to ruin, and who derived any benefit from it? The main thing was that the officials had to live. They lived off bribes. That’s why no one went to prison. That’s why no one paid taxes. That’s why no one had papers.

There’s the construction of a gigantic, unnecessary hotel, and some digging for buried treasure, and a money-making scheme involving the rope from a hanging, and scenes from the narrator’s childhood, all told in Roth’s ironic, laconic style, and it all doesn’t come together, at all, and it’s wonderful.

What it might have been, had Roth ever finished the book, I have no idea.

Somebody should write the rest of it. There’s an idea for you.

(In The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, Granta, 2002)