Synopses & Reviews
Vienna in the late nineteenth century -- with its countervailing images of pomp and profound melancholy -- provides the backdrop for Joseph Roth's final novel. lmmersing himself in the glories of a vanished past, Roth tells the tragic story of Mitzi Schnagel. After being abandoned by her erstwhile lover Captain Taittinger, she is forced into a bordello. It is there that the Persian Shah, on a state visit to the Kaiser, chooses Mitzi as his consort, rewarding her with a gift -- a magnificent string of pearls -- that proves unexpectedly baleful.
Like most of Roth's novels, this is a tale of personal and societal ruin, told in spare Kafka-like prose, and it provides an essential link to our understanding of the extraordinary fictive powers of Joseph Roth, who died tragically in Paris in 1839.
Review
"
The Tale of the 1002nd Night is sexy, highly ironic, sophisticated, and funny.... What a wonderful writer! Read him now. Thank me later."
-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
"[Roth's] books possess an eerie clairvoyant feel; they are shattering in their simplicity, exalting in their moral philosophical weight."
-Melvin Jules Bukiet, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Synopsis
Vienna of the late nineteenth century, with its contrasting images of pomp and profound melancholy, provides the backdrop for Joseph Roth's final novel, which he completed in exile, a few years before his tragic death in 1939. This brilliant, allegorical tale of seduction and personal and societal ruin, set amidst exquisite, wistful descriptions of a waning aristocratic age, provides an essential link to our understanding of Roth's extraordinary fictive powers.
About the Author
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin until Hitler's rise. He then emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1939.
Michael Hoffman is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English. He lives in London.