The Emperor's Tomb is a magically evocative,haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,and to the passing of time and the loss of youth and friends. Prophetic and regretful,intuitive and exact,Roth's acclaimed novel is the tale of one man's struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.
MEDIA REVIEWS
Publisher: Granta BooksISBN: 9781783788507Number of pages: 208Weight: 151 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 12 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
An urgent and deceptively moving lamentation of stark emotion... A profound farewell gesture of love and sorrow,such heartbreaking sorrowRoth is a master of sharp scene-shaping and storytelling... wonderfulSuperbly translated by the poet Michael Hofmann... Roth remains one of the greatest literary geniuses of the 20th centuryVividly written... No-one handles the passing of time,and the regrets this brings,better than RothBreathtaking... In despair,battling with poverty and illness,he nevertheless manages to create one astonishing scene after anotherThe carefully wrought work of a poet in full sympathy with his subject and his subject matter,in all its rootlessness,melancholy and ironic brevityThis lament has all the more power for knowing it was written as Europe was about to fall once moreEvents unfurl amid the morbid carnival of ever more grotesque political mutations,preceding the Anschluss in 1938... courageous,irrepressible (and) resplendentA new translation by the peerless Michael Hofmann,this is the troubled,troubling account of a young man struggling to fit into Vienna in the wake of the First World War,a time when the Nazis'behaviour was slowly becoming evidentRemarkableHere is a rare opportunity for English-speaking readers to better understand (the) fate (of the Austro-Hungarian Empire)... Worth readingA resourceful translationRoth is able to contain moral universes within the tiniest of narrative spans,and to convey almost unbearable purity in the plainest termsHis books posses an eerie clairvoyant feel,shattering in their simplicity,exalting in their moral philosophical weightLuminousFractured and melancholic... more an extended prose poem than a novelRoth wrote of the most serious things with the lightest of touchesBeautiful,elegant,almost dreamlikeUnforgettable,really great literatureLean,choppy....Pauperized and debilitated in exile,Roth was at his lowest ebb by 1939,but,in that courageous and irrepressible vein which marks the resplendent prose of The Emperor's Tomb,he still ends on a high
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