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Prior to this point, Andreas Pum hasn't exactly been a model of biblical eloquence. After losing a leg in World War I, he's made his living as a beggar with a hurdy-gurdy, soliciting coins from passersby. This pious lamebrain does have the luck to marry a voluptuous widow, and for a brief moment he partakes of "a new and numbing blissfulness, which armors us against the offenses and hurts of the world." But a quarrel with a middle-class snob on a tram soon deprives Andreas of his wife, his beggar's license, and his freedom.
Thus begins his descent, which Roth narrates in such a rapid-fire style that this Viennese Job seems to hit bottom almost overnight. Perhaps Andreas's final jeremiad--and indeed, his transformation into a quasi-anarchist--betrays the hand of an ideological stage manager. Yet Roth was far too brilliant a novelist to dabble in social realism, and even his portrait of Andreas's sentencing judge is deliciously equivocating:
The judge himself was clean-shaven. He had an impassive face of granite majesty, like a dead emperor's. It was gray as weathered sandstone.... It was a face that might have looked heartless and implacable, had the middle of its powerful masculine chin not held an appealing, almost childlike dimple.For this diehard fan of the Dual Monarchy, of course, the comparison to a dead emperor was the highest of compliments. But it was the novelist in Roth, not the left-leaning polemicist, who decided to add the dimple. --James Marcus
"There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth." --Joseph Brodsky
"What a marvelous writer! Read him now. You can thank me later." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
"One of the great writers in German of this century." --The London Times
"[Roth's] books possess an eerie clairvoyant feel; they are shattering in their simplicity, exalting in the moral philosophical weight." --Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragedie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction." --Nadine Gordimer
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