Weights and Measures

'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

Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading pleasure... A haunting little book, touched by genius

An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose... I want to read more

Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol... passages of electrifying beauty

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.

An artillery officer is persuaded by his resentful wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army to take up a civilian post as inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. At first attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is soon at a loss in a shadowy world of smugglers, profiteers and petty crooks. 
 
This great, painful novel is both a brilliant evocation of the remote reaches of eastern Europe before the catastrophe of the world wars and a frightening picture of the slow capitulation of a good man with traditional standards to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.

The Radetzky March

NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 
 
'Sublime ... it inspires a kind of evangelical cult passion among its devotees' Simon Schama 
 
'Roth is Austria's Chekhov' William Boyd 
 
Strauss's Radetzky March, signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years preceding the Austro-Hungarian collapse in 1918. Grandfather, son and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his enoblement; the second for the civil virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct which he cannot attain but against which he is too enfeebled to rebel.

One of the greatest novels written in the last century

One of the most readable, poignant, and superb novels in twentieth-century German: it stands with the best of Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Robert Musil. Roth was a cultural monument of Galician Jewry: ironic, compassionate, perfectly pitched to his catastrophic era

A masterpiece . . . The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction

The best novel is a book that, to my shame, I have only just read. Visiting Vienna earlier in the year, I realised how little I knew about the Austro-Hungarian empire. So I read Joseph Roth's 1932 book The Radetzky March (Penguin Classics) and, as soon as I finished reading it, I read it all over again.

Joseph Roth (Author) Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.

Strauss's Radetzky March, signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years preceding the Austro-Hungarian collapse in 1918. Grandfather, son and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his enoblement; the second for the civil virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct which he cannot attain but against which he is too enfeebled to rebel.

THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.

Joseph Roth

Carolin Duttlinger

Michael Hofmann

At the end of the Great War, Andreas Pum has lost a leg but at least he has a medal and a barrel-organ which he plays on the streets of Vienna. At first the simple-minded veteran is satisfied with his lot, and he even finds an ample widow to marry. But then a public quarrel with a respectable citizen on a tram turns Andreas's life onto a rapid downward trajectory. As he loses first his beggar's permit, then his new wife, and even his freedom, he is finally provoked into rejecting his blind faith in the benevolence of both government and God.

Joseph Roth

Rebellion

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