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Joseph Roth Novels

Perlefter: Now available for the first time in English, this important addition to the Roth canon is rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation. A novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death, this book chronicles the life and times of Alexander Perlefter, the well-to-do Austrian urbanite with whom his relative, a small-town narrator, Naphthali Kroj, has come to live after becoming orphaned. The colorful cast of characters includes Perlefter's four children: foolish Alfred, with his predilection for sleeping with servant girls and widows and boasting of the venereal diseases he contracts; the hapless Karoline, whose interest in math and physics and employment at a scientific institute seem to repel serious suitors; the flamboyant Julie, a sweet, pale, and anemic girl who likes any man who is inclined toward marriage; and the beautiful and flighty Margarete, besotted with a professor of history. Written circa 1928-30, Perlefter represents Joseph Roth at the very peak of his literary powers—it was penned just after the publication of The Silent Prophet and just before his masterpieces Job and The Radetzky March.

 

The Hundred Days: Napoleon's return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth. The incomparable Joseph Roth imagines Emperor Napoleon's last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica―an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates.

 

The Antichrist: Long out of print in English, this dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic has less to do with religion than with what Roth sees as the disintegrating moral fabric of the modern world Written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, this work was composed in cafés across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames. Such events no doubt influence the apocalytic tones of The Antichrist's protaganist, J.R., a journalist hired by an inscrutable media mogul hellbent on exposing evidence of the "Antichrist" throughout the world. This mission leads J.R. to authoritarian political regimes such as Red Earth (the Soviet Union) but also other poisonous terrains like The Land of Shadows (Hollywood)—it becomes all too clear that it is Roth's mission to chart the whole of civilization's slide into moral and political chaos. But herein lies the extraordinary strength and appeal of this work, as Roth is powerfully and even hilariously prescient. Mixing the diatribe with his trademark sardonic wit, he miraculously predicts the advent of the Holocaust, globalization, multimedia—even the paparazzi. Combining beautiful but savage writing with visual imagery out of a Coen Brothers movie, thisis an invaluable addition to the Roth canon in English.