Weights and Measures (Penguin Modern Classics)

''Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one''

At his wife''s insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe''s borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man.

Translated by David Le Vay