Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters
*Starred Review* “The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty.” Roth (1894–1939), a budding writer, sent these thoughts to his cousin Paula in 1917—words that took on enormous weight with crushing repercussions as he became an impassioned, incisively observant, renowned, and beleaguered journalist and novelist, crisscrossing Europe with laser eyes, tracking the early warning signs of monstrous catastrophes to come. Award-winning translator Hofmann has been instrumental in stoking new appreciation for Roth’s incandescent work (including his masterpiece, The Radetzky March), and now brings his profound fluency in Roth’s vision and writing to this accidental autobiography-in-letters, providing invaluable background and analysis in his refulgent commentary. In 457 arresting letters, Roth, a man of torrential talent, energy, and soul, blazes forth in all his fiery insight, prescience, wit, rage, and despair, chronicling a world succumbing to the apocalyptic spell of the Third Reich. Hardworking and hard-drinking, forever broke, embattled, and ill, Roth badgers editors and publishers, coos to admirers, and bellows, begs, whines, and confides to the famous and wealthy writer Stefan Zweig, Roth’s most generous and loyal ally and complete opposite. No letter collection is more intense nor more revealing of the anguished and heroic artistic struggle to confront horror with truth and beauty. --Donna Seaman