The Joseph Roth Collection: Book I: Bust of Emperor Franz Joseph, Confession a Murderer, False Weight

Three works from the exile years of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - each different in form, all unmistakably Roth.In The Bust of Emperor Franz Joseph, a Polish count of the old Habsburg world finds himself stranded in a new nation-state that has no language for the kind of belonging he has always taken for granted. His devotion to a vanished empire is treated as an eccentricity. It is, in fact, a form of faith.In Confession of a Murderer, a Russian exile in a Paris restaurant tells the story of his life to a group of silent listeners - a tale that moves from Odessa to St. Petersburg to revolutionary chaos and into the wreckage of exile, circling always around the question of what a man becomes when the world gives him every reason to be worse than he intended.In The False Weight, an incorruptible former soldier becomes the inspector of weights and measures in a remote Galician border town where every merchant cheats, every official takes bribes, and honesty is the only thing nobody has any use for. Then he meets a gypsy woman, and his integrity - the one thing he had left - begins to give way.Published between 1934 and 1937, during the years of Roth's Paris exile, these three works show the full range of a writer who could move between elegy, atmospheric noir, and moral fable without losing, in any register, his precise and devastating intelligence.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.

Pagina's: 320, Paperback, Independently published