German Literature Archives - Page 8 of 13

Harsh Reality? Love and Class in Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths

On Tangled Paths (Irrungen Wirrungen) is the fourth novel of the German author Theodor Fontane that I have read, and the third on this blog after No Way Back and Effi Briest. It is a love story, but an incredibly prosaic one. Its focus is the relationship of Lene, the adopted daughter of a washerwoman, and Botho, a young aristocrat and officer. The relationship is doomed from the start – Botho cannot possibly marry her. The great question is whether the characters will accept that and let what they have become a pleasant memory, or whether they will try to hold onto the past and potentially destroy their own futures. As with his other novels, Fontane writes simply, carefully, and intelligently about the social problems of the late 19th century. An old man when he published the novel in 1888, he treats his subject with corresponding warmth and wisdom.

Setting the Scene in On Tangled Paths

We begin with a house. Fontane demands a little initial patience – each one of his stories begins with a slow camera shot, drawing ever closer to a front door. The house in question is the one where Frau Nimptsch and Lene, her adopted daughter, live. From the beginning there is a note of plaintive nostalgia – Fontane mentions that the house is no longer there. We take this to mean that it has been consumed by the urban sprawl that transformed Berlin in the closing decades of the 19^th century from a comparative backwater to a metropolis as great as any then in Europe. We are witnessing in this building something temporary as the relationships of the novel, but still we are asked to sit by, to watch, to find its beauty.

A painting showing a thriving Berlin scene — In the background of *On Tangled Paths* we have a sense of the churning development of the newly founded German Empire. Many of the locations featured in the novel had already been destroyed and replaced by new buildings to house the city’s ballooning population by the time Fontane published it. Painting by Adolph von Menzel

Alongside Frau Nimptsch is an old couple, the Dörrs. They grow a little produce that they sell at market. These four characters form the working class of the novel, an untraditional family of sorts. They bicker, they argue, but there is a tenderness and warmth here. We are introduced to Lene and her relationship through conversation between the two older women. Frau Dörr, whose husband married her in part because he considered her more attractive for once having had a relationship with someone from the higher classes, takes a somewhat cynical view of things – that one must remain detached. “When they start gettin’ ideas, that’s when things turn bad.” Love is not something that triumphs over all else, but one factor among many in determining what makes best sense.

Lene and her Love

Lene is perhaps my favourite heroine of Fontane’s. Though she is young, she evades many of the clichés authors, especially male authors, usually attach to their female creations. And indeed, perhaps that’s what I like about Fontane – for all his mundanity in style, his content is quietly revolutionary. I was genuinely surprised when I understood that On Tangled Paths was going to have such a focus on the lower classes. It was so natural, but at the same time unusual for a work of the 19^th century. Though Lene is in love with Botho, her aristocrat, she also is intelligent enough to know that their time is limited. At one moment she’s putting a strawberry in her mouth for him to eat; in another, she’s admitting she knows this cannot last.

“Believe me, having you here now, having this time with you, that’s my happiness. I don’t worry about what the future holds. One day I’ll find you’ve flown away…”

Maybe words like these are dishonest. Maybe Lene uses them to try to convince herself to let him go. But they still speak to a deep self-knowledge and reflection, a kind of strength of character.

We meet Lene already into the relationship with Botho. They met after a boating trip went wrong and Botho intervened to save her party. That is in Easter, and before the end of the Summer things are finished between them. Time is short, and they aim to spend it well. One day, they go alone on a trip to an inn out in the countryside for a few days of peace and quiet. The whole experience is fragile, but beautiful for that very fragility. “Neither of them said anything. They mused on their happiness and wondered how much longer it would last.”

Botho…

Botho is less interesting than Lene, but then again, I’ve met far more of his kind in literature than I’ve met of hers. Botho is the kind of person I’d dismiss as a fool, no doubt because I see myself in him. He is terribly weak-willed, completely prey to external circumstances – his reputation, his family, and money. He is, at least at first, unable to do either what is necessary and part with Lene, or else to do battle against necessity and find a way for them to be together forever. Anything that suggests commitment he shies away from.

But at the same time, he is interesting more for what he and his role says about class in the early German Empire. Fontane is, after all, writing a book that is keenly attuned to slight and not-so-slight social differences. From the moment we meet him we’re aware that he’s not like the others: “He was visibly on the merry side, having come straight from imbibing a May punch, the object of a wager at his club”. He has been at the club, a place inaccessible to the women both on account of their gender and their class. He is jolly, but there is a hint of mockery about his joviality. When he declares that every station in life has its dignity, even that of a washerwoman, it’s hard to tell whether he really means it, or indeed anything he says.

…And his World

Fontane shows us Botho among Lene’s people, and then among his own. The change is immediately apparent. No longer is he Botho, but “Baron Botho von Rienäcker”. He lives in an apartment, with servants, with art on the walls and a bird in a cage for entertainment – the little hobbies of a certain social stratum. When he meets his friends they adopt masks in the form of names taken from books – Lene can read, but she hasn’t the cultural knowledge that is second nature to Botho’s coterie. He dines out with them, and we have a sense of further insurmountable linguistic barriers. Metaphors are invariably hunting related, or else concern the military – they are all officers. Botho’s enjoyment of Lene is tolerated, but not any suggestion that he would take it further. He is allowed entertainment, but not to go against his duty. He is trapped, but not like her.

A painting showing a restaurant scene of the sort Lene wouldn't have access too with her income and class — Max Liebermann, *Restaurant Terrace in Nienstedten*, 1902. Nienstedten is in Hamburg, but I like the painting. Food and drink is a part of Fontane’s repertoire of social commentary in *On Tangled Paths.* The Dörrs grow their own food, while Botho simply orders it. When he dines with Lene he gets filling meals of fish, but with Käthe he is forced into eating sweets – one woman provides what is nutritious, the other what is only on fulfilling on the surface.

But we should not judge him too harshly. He cannot truly know her life, just as she cannot truly know his. Each station has its sufferings, and while one certainly has it worse, we can only compare what we know. For Lene, the relationship is her life. “Lord, it’s such a pleasure just to have something going on. It’s often so lonely out here.” Her simple words speak to a deeper gulf. He can always find another Lene, but she can never find another Botho. Once, she describes seeing him in town among his people, riding. She cannot approach – her position is one of a spectator, doomed never to interact with him in the public space. She does not have the systematic advantage that is his by birth.

Two Perfect Matches?

Suddenly the relationship ends. Botho’s expenses have consistently eclipsed his spending, and his mother puts her foot down in a letter. Botho breaks with Lene, marries his rich cousin, and time skips forward two and a half years. Käthe, his wife, is a disappointment. Lene’s desire to learn is beautifully shown in a scene where she inspects a painting whose inscription is in English. She can mouth the letters with passionate interest, but their meaning is inevitably hidden from her. Käthe just doesn’t care. She epitomizes everything that Botho dislikes about his class – she is frivolous, full of empty words and phrases, and childish. Part of this is yet again a language problem – Botho wants authenticity; instead, he gets “chic, tournure, savoir-faire” – all French and fashionable words. He compares Käthe’s soulless letters from her time at a resort town to Lene’s misspelt but heartfelt ones.

And yet in On Tangled Paths there is no going back.

Meanwhile, Lene suffers into a new life of her own. She and Frau Nimptsch move out of their old home. In their new lodgings a religious man, Gideon Franke, falls in love with her. It is not the best match in the world, but Franke is hardworking, industrious – a new and modern man, through and through. He brings to Lene’s life much-needed stability, saving her from what no doubt would otherwise have been frightening poverty. Given a woman’s lot in the era, we should probably be as grateful as she is.

Pessimism or Realism? – the Morals of On Tangled Paths

Botho eventually comes to terms with his situation. In this lies the pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, side of On Tangled Paths and Fontane in general – no rash actions come in to save the day. But then again, no rash actions come in to spoil it. He doesn’t try to meet her again; in fact, he burns their love letters to better forget her. Lene, whose parentage is unknown, doesn’t turn out to be of royal blood. She doesn’t turn out to be anybody but herself. Botho, for his part, decides to find the good in his wife. It is not a wholly successful endeavour, but these things take a lifetime, and for Fontane it is enough to show the beginning of the process.

A photo of Theodor Fontane, author of On Tangled Paths, in his later years — Theodor Fontane. He started writing fiction when he was 57, and his works reflect that. There is a wisdom in *On Tangled Paths* and elsewhere, which though at times can strike one as pessimistic, nonetheless comes from a lifetime’s experience.

One day a colleague from the military meets him, Rexin, and asks his advice. He wants to know what to do about his own mistress: he hopes to marry her, or else escape Berlin altogether. He longs for “honesty, love and freedom” and hopes Botho will back him up. But Botho does not. He says that it is better to stop now, before the memories get too strong. No middle path is acceptable in the world they live in, and in the end staying within society’s bounds will always be the thing to do. It’s a surprisingly conservative message. But then, perhaps it’s the right one. The social bonds are simply too tight for anything beyond them to be worthwhile. There is no great love against the odds here, but we must remember that there is no great tragedy here either.

Perhaps “A silly young wife” really “is better than none at all”, as Botho concludes.

Conclusion

On Tangled Paths celebrates a pragmatic approach to life. Lene and Botho may not elsewhere reach the heights of bliss that they had had together, but they also remain alive and happy (enough) when the novel draws to a close. In the 19^th century novel this is already a great achievement. The message that love does not, or oughtn’t, conquer all may strike us as pessimistic or overly conservative, but I find it hard to argue with here. Lene perhaps is perhaps right in her parting words to Botho: “If you’ve had a beautiful dream you should thank God for it and not complain when the dream ends and reality returns.” Better to have a beautiful dream than see life become a nightmare.

I have come to love Fontane. His novels are short, but they each display a great deal of variety in their subject matter, and they are all extremely well-written. However boring they may appear, they are all worthy of close and repeated reading. The only shame is that with On Tangled Paths I have now reached the end of Fontane’s novels easily available in English translation. There exist versions of both Jenny Treibel, and of The Stechlin, but they are hard to find. I may be forced, alas, to read him in the original again, as I did Effi. Luckily, Fontane’s worth it. Wish me luck!

Sex and Society in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else is a surprising novella of sex and desire that retains its power to shock even now, almost a hundred years after it was published in 1924. Its Austrian-Jewish author, Arthur Schnitzler, was rather notorious in his day for his works’ frank depictions of sexuality, especially – in the case of Fräulein Else – of female sexuality. Taking us inside his characters’ heads, in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses, Schnitzler in Fräulein Else and elsewhere shows us what, under the respectable veneer of 19^th century literary realism, was lurking all along – real and violent passion.

A painting of a reclining woman. The cover of my edition of Fräulein Else. — William Edward Frost, “Life study of the female figure”, (c) Victoria & Albert Museum. *Fräulein Else* asks us, at least in part, to consider how far the socially conditioned idea of innocent and passive women is actually true by showing us what actually takes place within one such woman’s mind.

Fräulein Else is the story of a young girl whose life falls apart over the course of one evening. A playful and young nature comes against forces she is unable to withstand – forces of power, both masculine and monetary. Else’s story is that of an attempt to live against a world that is unwilling to let her do so, and the results are ultimately fatal.

Setting the Scene – the beginning of Fräulein Else

We are introduced in Fräulein Else to our protagonist in her natural state – at play. She has just finished a round of tennis with her cousin and his lover and she has decided to go back to her hotel. Else is in Italy, in the Trentino resort of San Martino di Castrozza. Whether the action takes place before or after the First World War is hard to make out – the hotel is full of international guests, just as in a Henry James novel – but we have a sense that for the likes of Else, the time doesn’t matter. She plays games, flirts endlessly in her head, imagines herself with many lovers, pictures a wonderful villa by the beach, and obsesses over her naked figure. All is well in the world.

But then a letter comes from home in Vienna. Her father, a lawyer, has fallen on hard times and there is no way for the family to keep itself afloat without Else’s help. Every friend has already lent him money, and there is now no choice but for Else to ask an acquaintance of her father’s at the hotel, Herr Dorsday, whether he would pay off the 30000 Guilder debt within the next two days. Otherwise the debtors’ prison awaits him. Else eventually asks Dorsday for her help, but he sets a condition – Else must show herself to him, naked, at midnight. After all her sexual imaginings, the idea repulses her, and she is sent spiralling into confusion. On the one hand, the demands of her father, of maintaining her social position; on the other, her desire for sexual autonomy.

One moment she seems to condemn her father to either shooting himself or being locked up; the next, she wants it to be herself who dies.

Else herself – a successful free spirit?

Coming from the 19^th century as I more or less do, Else’s clearly articulated sexuality is surprising, if not quite as shocking as it would once have been. Her pleasure in her young and naked body shows the pure desire to live that she embodies:

“Ah, how wonderful it is to walk naked up and down one’s room. Am I really as beautiful as the mirror makes me look? Ah, come a little closer, my young lady. I want to kiss your blood-red lips. I want to press your breasts to mine. What a shame it is, that glass, cold glass, separates the two of us. Oh how good we would be together. Isn’t it so? We need nobody else. Not a single other human being.”

But for all her sexual confidence, the text also reveals a kind of solipsism on Else’s part. Without any love for those in the world, she ultimately turns inward. She is free spirited, imagining herself with hundreds of lovers, but she has no respect for any of them. I liked her because of her wilfulness, not because she is in any way a good person. But this lack of love for others is also, it seems, the result of a lack of love from them too. After dismissing the French and piano lessons she concludes of her upbringing: “But what goes on in my heart and what digs at me and makes me afraid, has anyone ever cared about that?” We have a sense that, even disregarding the stream of consciousness, Else is not only unhappy, she is also terribly alone.

A Woman’s Lot

Thoughts of suicide circle around Else like flies. She has several capsules of Veronal, a popular sleeping pill, and even before the letter arrives she considers taking them all. For all her spiritedness, what stands out about Else is just how unhappy she is. In spite of her attempts to maintain autonomy in this world, it’s clear that she’s trapped in it. Even though she pretends that all is well at the novel’s beginning, the very fact that she has the pills on hand suggests that this is not exactly the case.

She is not talented. She admits as much. “I’m not made for a bourgeois life. I possess no talent”. She speaks several languages and plays the piano, but in the end, there’s nothing she can do with her life except waft about hotels. Her choice is either a sensible marriage, or a “nurse or telephone operator”. For a woman at the time, there were few other choices. When she tries to assert herself, her only option is to be a “Luden” – a slut, as opposed to the whore Dorsday wants her to be, or a passive wife. But even this assertion is imperilled by her dependence on Dorsday’s money. In the end, she can barely assert herself at all.

Else hatches an insane plan involving going to Dorsday, who is listening to music, naked but for a coat and shoes. She is successful, but the intensity of the moment leads to her fainting and being carried back to her room by her cousin and her aunt while they wait for a doctor. Here again we have a sense of Else’s powerlessness as a woman. Her problems and mental state are immediately dismissed as hysteria and – what is more – her aunt thinks the best course of action is simply to lock Else away in an institution. Even among women, the pressure to conform is paralysing, and the punishments for non-conformity are terrifying. Else, who has shown her sexuality in public via her nakedness, now must be hidden away.

Decline and Fall: Money and Society

But the greatest pressures on Else are financial. One key tension of Fräulein Else lies between one’s place in society, and where one ought to be. As Else remarks, she’s not fit for the bourgeois life. Alongside her own thoughts of suicide, she mentions that her father’s brother killed himself when he was young too. Her father is desperately, and failingly, trying to maintain his position in society through money that he doesn’t have. Else herself can only enjoy the hotel because of the good graces of her aunt, who is paying for her stay. Wherever she looks, she is dependent on others because she has no money for herself. Dorsday can control her because he has money, and because he is an older man. Even if Else were to go against him Dorsday can dismiss her as being hysterical. She is doubly trapped.

Stream of Consciousness, Loss of Consciousness

In fact, the very form and style of Fräulein Else plays into its suggestions about female sexuality and suffocating society. Else is free – to flirt, to imagine a beautiful future – but only within her own mind. Whenever she comes into contact with external forces, whether they be a telegram from Vienna or a chance encounter with friends, she is unable to control herself – social and familial obligations suddenly take over. At the novella’s end, when Else lies dying after a sudden faint, the situation is particularly acute. She is conscious – she hears what others are saying all around her – but she is unable to get up to act or speak for herself. In dying, she has become even more fully the object, open to the control of others, than she ever was before. The sense of being locked in is only the culmination of an entire novella’s worth of powerlessness.

Conclusion

I liked Fräulein Else. Else herself, with her divided nature and conflicting loyalties, is described well – I really felt she was alive, and though I knew what was coming it was awful to watch it happening through her eyes. I really had a sense of how much she wanted to live, and yet how hard it was for her to do so in the society she lived in. But all the same, and as much as I liked the stream of consciousness style, I felt a sense of relief when I finished the story. A feeling of claustrophobia from the style suits the plot, but it’s not something I would want to see extended into a novel-length project. Fräulein Else is good because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Any longer and we might lose our patience with our young and foolish protagonist, or the tragedy might be blunted.

Fräulein Else is the first thing I’ve read by Schnitzler and will probably not be the last – if for no other reason than my edition also contains his “Lieutenant Gustl”, and because the German was surprisingly easy to read. For more Austro-Hungarian tales of declines and falls, Hofmannsthal, Márai, and Zweig are your “friends”.

Have I completely misread Else? Why not leave a comment below?

Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Hiob) – A Review

There is something about Bible stories, and all ancient storytelling, that gives them great power. We all have our feelings, our moments of joy and despair, but compared to the era of belief what richness of emotion have we lost! The story of Job contains one example of such richness. Our present sufferings can seem to pale in comparison with those of a man who feels betrayed by his God. For, whatever great and terrible increase in scale of suffering we bear witness to (especially these days…), there appears to have been a concomitant loss in depth of pain. Many Bible stories have been modernised in literature and the arts in general, and perhaps first among these is the Book of Job. This tale of good and evil and the mystery of the divine maintains its strength even now, when faith is little more than a puff of smoke.

A photo of Joseph Roth, author of Job — Joseph Roth is most famous for two works – Job: The Story of a Simple Man, and The Radetzky March. After being so impressed by Job I hope to read the latter as soon as I can.

It’s not hard to see why Joseph Roth, a Jew writing in German, might have found Job’s story close to his heart. Born in 1894 in Brody, on the edge of the multinational Habsburg Empire, his life was one of recurrent tragedy. An absent father, battles with antisemitism in the military, the collapse of his country (which, with all its peoples, allowed many Jews like Roth to feel at home), the madness and incarceration into a mental institute of his wife, his own alcoholism, and finally the rise of Hitler – none of these was a recipe for joy.

But his novel of 1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, to give it its full title, is in its way a joyous tale. For all its monstrous grief and suffering, Roth’s story of Jewish life is filled with a gentle nostalgia and affection for the minor things of life that bring it value. In some way, it’s similar to John Williams’s novel, Stoner, which also takes a life of misfortune and finds the beauty in it. I’d like to share what I loved about Roth’s Job below.

A Jew in Russia

A Simple, Pious, Life

Job begins by introducing us to Mendel Singer, its hero and our modern-day Job. He is “pious, God-fearing and ordinary”, and he works as a teacher. He is humble; his house is small. His faith and trust in God is simple and true. He teaches children because he does not have the knowledge to teach older children the ways of his faith. Mendel Singer lives in the borderlands of the Russian Empire. He lives there with his family – his wife Deborah, his daughter Miriam, and his three sons – Shemariah, Jonas, and Menuchim. The last son was born unlucky, unable to grow normally or talk. His unlucky birth is the first tragedy that is visited upon the home of Mendel Singer.

But really it is hard to say how far this early part of Job is bleak. Instead, for all the poverty the Singer family live in, there is a remarkable dignity to their world, in part thanks to Roth’s careful attention to his characters and his beautiful language. I don’t know how anyone could read something like this without feeling a sense of nostalgia, a feeling that life is being lived:

“He sat down, sang a little song, then the parents and children slurped the hot soup, smiled at the plates and spoke not a word. Warmth rose in the room. It swarmed from the pots, the bowls, the bodies.”

Mendel’s teaching, too, is given the same treatment:

“The bright choir of children’s voices repeated word after word, sentence after sentence, it was as if the Bible were being tolled by many bells.”

Of course, simply writing beautifully is not enough to cancel out grief. But there is no grief here – not in these passages, at any rate. The feeling that we have as we read Job is instead that we are always too late in counting our blessings, in realising what value there is in what we already have. We are drawn into wisdom by witnessing the absence of it. We can only watch, powerlessly, as Job’s family slip towards abyss after abyss.

Grief Begins

The two healthy boys grow up and are conscripted into the Russian army – which meant a lifetime away from home, and an enforced rejection of Jewish strictures like avoiding pork. By using all of her savings Deborah is able to get Shemeriah smuggled out of the country – and this too, meant that the chance of ever seeing his family again is next to zero. And Miriam, the girl, begins to flirt with the Cossacks, with the Russian soldiers in town. Only Menuchim remains at home, and he is speechless and dumb.

A photo showing a traditional Jewish family outside their house. — A Jewish family in a Schtetl in 1903, around the time Job: The Story of a Simple Man begins. Amusingly and sadly, some of the locations in Job are also featured in Isaac Babel’s tales of (among other things) the destruction of Jewish life in Western Russia and Poland, Red Army Cavalry.

Now beautiful descriptions start moving towards describing torment. “Sorrow blew through their hearts like a constant hot and biting wind”. When Shemeriah, now Sam, writes from America, describing its glory and his prosperity, the father’s grief is laid open – his soul cannot leave the world it has always inhabited. “The sons disappeared: Jonas served the Tsar in Pskov and was no longer Jonas. Shemariah bathed on the shores of the ocean and was no longer called Shemariah. Miriam… wanted to go to America too. Only Menuchim remained what he had been since the day of his birth: a cripple. And Mendel Singer himself remained what he had always been: a teacher.”

I liked the way that the story is so simple. Each of the healthy children has an animal associated with them. Miriam, the coquette, is a gazelle; Jonas the strong is a bear; while Shemariah the cunning and thoughtful is a fox. The simplicity of the piled-up misfortunes makes an equally simple plot diagram. The idea is simple, even if the execution makes use of modern ideas and modern problems. Things like interminable Russian bureaucracy mix easily together with brutal and unfortunately timeless antisemitism. For instance, while walking home one night Mendel thinks – so simply, as to be shocking to a sheltered reader like myself – “A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft and beat him to death on the spot – with a stone perhaps”.

A Jew in America

America – the Promised Land?

Mendel Singer, thanks to news and money from Sam and to avoid Miriam’s desire to be with Cossacks, gathers his family for the one-way journey to America. But Menuchim, still underdeveloped, is left behind – the journey would be too much for him. For Deborah in particular this is a moment of crisis. When she went to the rabbi about her deformed son his promise was that he would grow up to be wise and strong, but that for this to come to pass she must not leave him, even if he is a great burden. But still, with no choice, the family leave him entrusted to another family, and depart.

A photo of New York in the 1900s. — New York (pictured) and America more broadly, may have been a land of opportunity, but for Mendel Singer they marked another step towards the loss of his identity, his culture, and his once unshakeable faith in God’s goodness.

In America Mendel Singer finds riches – his son Sam is a clever guy. But he also finds himself and his world further slipping away from the simple, pious, world that he’s truly after. He notices that in America there are no frogs or crickets at night, and the stars above are “miserable” and “mutilated”. He escapes into dreams, hoping that Menuchim will get better. One day he hears from Jonas in the army, and joy returns for a brief moment. And then terrible, dreadful, history shows its hand. War breaks out in Europe.

The book continues its downward descent. “Fear shook him as the wind a weak tree”. Tragedy comes for Mendel Singer, again and again. At first he prays, and then begins to feel that singing psalms is nothing against the might of flames and cannons. It is the first kind of doubt in Job. The sense that God cannot hear you. But things will get worse still. America has yet to join the war.

Rebellion

Mendel talks to the dead. He knows that God has forsaken him. “For me He has no pity. For I’m a dead man and live”. But his passive feeling cannot last. One more tragedy awaits to push him over the edge. The high point of Job is so unbelievably good. Roth takes his source material and makes a real, thundering, blasphemous rebellion out of it. I had to stop reading I was so in awe. Mendel attempts to burn his bible – the one possession still connecting him with his past in Russia. We see, in his mind, the pages burning, but he hesitates. “His heart was angry with God, but in his muscles the fear of God still dwelled”.

Mendel’s neighbours come to try to stop him. They try to speak to him of Job, the story of a man punished by God as a test. Mendel will have none of it. “My presence brings misfortune, and my love draws down the curse as a lone tree in a flat field the lightning”. His final outburst is something awesome:

“The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel. I am not afraid, my friends!”

Mendel’s final rebellion can only come from a position of faith, because only faith disappointed can lower you into such depths. It is beautiful and harrowing in equal measure, but also uncanny. As if, for the modern reader, Mendel is a fool for his belief. But a fool we can’t help but admire, and perhaps, one we wish we could emulate.

Conclusion: A Good Job?

Job: The Story of a Simple Man ultimately does not stray too far from its biblical source. However, I found the modernised ending to be one of the weakest parts of the book. Roth, the translator Ross Benjamin writes in my copy’s afterword, once confessed that he could only have written the ending drunk. That’s the impression I got too. The modern world is well suited for tragedy, but modernising miracles, as Roth attempts to do, can come across as fake and kind of desperate. But that’s not to devalue Job. It is a really good, really enjoyable book. Roth’s language is wonderful, and his feeling for the slow declines of modern life – the loss of identity, of culture, of homeland – is sublime. I thoroughly recommend it, and will definitely be reading some more Roth very soon.

Have you read any Joseph Roth? Leave a comment with your thoughts if you have.

Update: for my review of The Radetzky March, go here.