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Hotel Savoy / Fallmerayer the Stationmaster / The Bust of the Emperor
Hardcover
Published November 27, 1986
About the author
Joseph Roth
640 books820 followersJoseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. Roth was born into a Jewish family. He died in Paris after living there in exile.
http://www.josephroth.de/
http://www.josephroth.de/
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 27, 2018
His first novel, more a novella. A soldier returns from internment in Russia after the Great War to a town in the east of the old A-H empire, probably Poland at this time. The hotel and the town are a microcosm of postwar Europe. His gift for describing sadness was here right at the beginning of his career.
"They sit enmeshed in the dusty grey web of their cares and flutter like trapped flies...Things were going badly with these people. They prepared their own destiny and yet believed that it came from God. They were prisoners of tradition, their hearts hung by a thousand threads and the threads were spun by their own hands. Along all the ways of their lives stood the thou shalt not of their god, their police, their kings, their position. In this direction they could go no further, and in that place they could stay no longer. And so, after a couple of decades during which they had struggled, made mistakes and not known which way to turn, they died in their beds and bequeathed their wretchedness to their descendants."
One thing about it that I found striking and troubling in the light of subsequent history was his portrayal of Jews. Roth himself came from a Jewish background but in this book - and much of his other work - he appears to be observing them from the outside. I found it a disturbing kind of dissociation.
"They sit enmeshed in the dusty grey web of their cares and flutter like trapped flies...Things were going badly with these people. They prepared their own destiny and yet believed that it came from God. They were prisoners of tradition, their hearts hung by a thousand threads and the threads were spun by their own hands. Along all the ways of their lives stood the thou shalt not of their god, their police, their kings, their position. In this direction they could go no further, and in that place they could stay no longer. And so, after a couple of decades during which they had struggled, made mistakes and not known which way to turn, they died in their beds and bequeathed their wretchedness to their descendants."
One thing about it that I found striking and troubling in the light of subsequent history was his portrayal of Jews. Roth himself came from a Jewish background but in this book - and much of his other work - he appears to be observing them from the outside. I found it a disturbing kind of dissociation.
March 17, 2011
Hotel Savoy is an early novel, and has a different feel from many of the later works. Realistic, but just a little "off", almost surrealistic. And the novellas are good too. Roth is one of the really good ones.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews