The 3 best books by the great Joseph Roth

The most convulsive of spaces in XNUMXth century Europe was undoubtedly the one made up of a Austro-Hungarian Empire that would be crushed into a thousand (or rather 19) pieces. Joseph Roth He was born in 1894 and grew up in the splendor of the Empire and died in 1939, when that strange agglomerating homeland was only a vague memory of another Europe, peering into the abyss at that time.

In the meantime, what is the same in Roth's short life, a very extensive work of the genius gone before his time. Even so, close at times to other brilliant contemporaries such as himself Thomas Mann o Hermann Hesse.

Probably, having reached an octogenarian age like the other two mentioned, we would find ourselves before a bibliography of the most interesting, with that value of chronicle in parallel of intrahistories about what happened in an entire century as turbulent as the XNUMXth was in the old continent.

Even so, we can enjoy those already elegant classics by Joseph Roth, with the aftertaste of the precious literature of yesteryear, capable of the crudest existentialism but also of the lyrical forms to accompany a prose of transcendent, philosophical will.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Joseph Roth

The Radetzky march

Composed as a glorious anthem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this march is chosen as an ironic metaphor for the fall that followed. From the Trotta family, in its three generations, we observe the future of the world, because Europe was then capitalizing on cultural, social, economic and business transformations. Until, parallel to the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although not directly associated with this, Europe began to overshadow its global hegemony and everything became dislocated, from customs to social strata.

It was more the effort of self-destruction, the worst of the forms of that well-known death by success that already occurred with the Roman Empire. Although revolutions also arise as a necessary will for change. The question, which I leave the thread of the novel is the richness of an unforgettable intrahistory that starts from the wealthy Europe in its particular peaceful, stratified world, always before the Great War.

But with this there were always small conflicts such as the battle of Solferino, the first occasion in which the Trotta changed their status as a reward for their help to the emperor. Fidelity is well paid as part of that extreme consideration for believers in the current system. The journey between the historical, the fictional, with a lyrical touch and always embellished by a precise description of captivating brushstrokes, develops for the reader until the Great War and the beginning of the end for a world held in a strange limbo, facing the modernity demanded by the 20th century and the attachment to traditions that enveloped everything.

The Radetzky march

The legend of the holy drinker

One of those volumes of essential stories. Tales for adults passed through the sieve of the expired years as the inescapable term of the loser that we are all peering out at last.

There is no moral in the stories or teaching despite their appearance at times as a parable. There is only an exhibition of misery between lucid fantastic apparitions, as if arrived from the delirium of the drinker capable, despite everything, of continuing to write paragraphs of miraculously exceptional literature. We lose ourselves in the legend of the holy drinker to consider that Roth could be Andreas himself, a homeless guy out of conviction about a higher mission that seems more evident with each drink until each new dawn dissolves.

But we also meet characters clinging to a land that claims them far above their dreams, subjected to the physical gravity that nullifies everything. The railwayman Fallmeyer and his soul replicating the regularity of the passage of the trains that always escape, a coral commercial that will never be able to see the sea... Characters that would not be out of place in a Poe story, except that the horrors come more from the raw reality than any delirium assumed as liberation.

Roth's last book in Paris that welcomed him as a one-time drinker and writer before leaving, leaving a narrative legacy that is appreciated more and more every day.

The legend of the holy drinker

Strawberries

It never hurts to take a tour of the most autobiographical part of any mythical author. This is a collector's book. Both in form and in substance. What the great writer Joseph Roth could have kept as a sketch for a book to narrate his harsh childhood has resulted in this final presentation long after his death at the dawn of World War II, a victim of his addiction to alcohol.

Roth is one of those mythical authors, cursed by History and his circumstances, rather than cursed by his own decision. A Jew in pre-Nazi Europe and a victim of various family problems in his childhood and also in his adulthood, he has reached our days, covered in a dense fog over the reality of his life. The creator's childhood is made up of certain verified data and possible fictions narrated by himself.

For this reason, perhaps Strawberries could be the definitive work where its readers can find some light on the author's life between his own prose and his ability to fit all kinds of characters in extremely lucid situations that heralded the decline of Europe between ideals and hate.

His vision of the child that was serves to advance a plot soaked in nostalgia for a happy childhood that was never such. Thus, bitterness and fatalism end up ruling everything. His pen profiles characters from that interwar Europe that was approaching the other extreme part of this fateful period. Brody is the town where Joseph wanted to have been the happy boy.

It is true that he lived and grew up there during his first years of life, and from there he may have gotten the idea of ​​many of the characters who peered into his main creations, but the city of Brody was really the cradle of his long-term sadness. throughout his life and transmitted in his detached, shameless and melancholic writing.

Strawberries, Roth

Other recommended books by Joseph Roth

April

Sabina already sang it. And there is no month of April without melancholy when it ends up being kept in a drawer, next to the heart. There is no more glory than the moment, no more beauty, no more explanation to an entire existence. Our true God is time. A Cronos that shows us his perishable glimpses of our mutable world. As long as he surely keeps to himself the pleasures of perpetual contemplation, of constant enjoyment, of the eternal sensation of ecstasy.

"As the train lurched again and began to roll smoothly, I waved and looked the girl in the eye. Only because of that look have I written this story. In this brief initiation story by Roth, the reader will discover not only the author's sensitivity in many of his later books, but also a story full of signs, mystery and all the evocative beauty of this brilliant writer.

April, Joseph Roth
5/5 - (12 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.