Mostly About Stories

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?

Did you find what you were looking for? John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing

This is the real deal: Butcher’s Crossing, a Western by the author of Stoner, is a truly awesome book. Because although it’s deadly serious, it’s also a Western through and through. Adventure, violence, and the great outdoors are all here in abundance and lovingly described. The only difference between Butcher’s Crossing and more traditional examples of the genre is that Williams, through respect for it and its worlds – he himself grew up in Texas – shows that behind its clichés there lurks an untapped dread, horror, and depth. Just as Conrad cut incisively into the myths of Western Imperialism in works like Heart of Darkness, here Williams does the same for legends of America’s westward expansion. But instead of resorting to the fantastic brutality of Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, Butcher’s Crossing works by being completely realistic. Its enemies are not superhuman judges but simple nature, harsh and incomprehensible.

The first edition cover of Butcher's Crossing, showing two crossed rifles and a buffalo. — The first edition cover of *Butcher’s Crossing*. In the story Western tropes are used to reveal the nihilism and terror lurking underneath our romantic view of the West. But the story itself is romantic, and that’s where its great power comes from.

A Hero and his Search

Our hero is William Andrews. A young man of twenty-three, he has done a few years at Harvard and had enough. Inspired by the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Butcher’s Crossing takes place around 1872), Andrews sets out West, to find… something. “It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous”. But the word “perceived” already clues us into Andrew’s uncertainty. We have no reason to doubt the goodness of his intentions, but every reason to doubt his surety in what they are. At the beginning of the novel Andrews blunders into Butcher’s Crossing, a small town dependent on the trade in buffalo hides. He has a letter of recommendation for a man there, McDonald, who knew his father.

Andrews is not heroic. He is terribly naïve and idealistic. He mistakenly identifies a local prostitute as the friend of a man he’s meeting in the saloon, rejects an offer of work from McDonald (“I don’t want to be tied down”) and almost immediately gets involved with a huntsman, Miller. This man tells him a story about a mythical, heavenly valley in Colorado Territory filled with buffalo, and Andrews can’t resist offering to help finance an expedition there. He’s attracted by Miller, a man of action who knows the land, and who seems to understand what Andrews is after. “A body’s got to speak up for his self, once in a while”, he says. Three men join Andrews on the expedition: a religious one-armed drunkard, Charley Howe; a coldly independent German, Fred Schneider; and Miller himself. For Andrews, this is the most meaningful time of his life.

But perhaps that meaning’s not what we’re really after.

Adventure and Style in Butcher’s Crossing

What does the feeling of adventure mean, and how do stories give us it? Perhaps it is feeling of seeing something new when it is balanced by the sense that this new thing is real and valuable. When we look out of the car window and see nothing except repeating suburbia, or an endless forest, it can feel like it’s not an adventure because we don’t want to find value in the landscape, though for someone with a different set of experiences, this suburbia or woodland could be exactly the novel world they are looking for. A writer of talent can make the familiar new and the unvalued valuable, but there certainly needs to be a journey involved in an adventure too. We need to feel a sense of movement, of progression in landscape or in knowledge.

A painting showing a mountain, lake and forest — Albert Bierstadt – The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, used on the cover of the NYRB version of Butcher’s Crossing. The painting, like the novel, captures the beauty of the landscape.

The adventure of Butcher’s Crossing is a descent. I noticed that the characters of the book are almost always described as going downward in key moments. And this downward path is a moral one as well as a physical one. But long before the darkness creeps in, we are treated to a world of beauty. The world of Emerson’s “Nature” and picture books Andrews read when he was at home. And this beauty is described with a style that for me is incomparable. Williams is a master of the perfectly carved sentence, one neither too long nor too short. When you read him you have the feeling that he worked out every word and its position with the utmost care and long before he put pen to paper. An interview with his widow I read bears this out. But he is also meticulous – every action is described in detail.

“The rich buffalo grass, upon which their animals fattened even during the arduous journey, changed its colour throughout the day; in the morning, in the pinkish rays of the early sun, it was nearly gray; later, in the yellow light of the midmorning sun, it was a brilliant green; at noon it took on a bluish cast; in the afternoon, in the intensity of the sun, at a distance, the blades lost their individual character and through the green showed a distinct cast of yellow, so that when a light breeze whipped across, a living colour seemed to run through the grass, to disappear and reappear from moment to moment. In the evening after the sun had gone down, the grass took on a purplish hue as if it absorbed all the light from the sky and would not give it back.”

The Mountains: Buffalo Killing

A virgin land, the mountain valley, their goal – Miller’s suggestion that there is a secret paradise has a kind of mythic feel to it. Elsewhere, the buffalo numbers have already massively declined from overhunting. But the place is real, and soon the hunters reach it. “A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched”. Andrews feels a sense of fulfilment as they approach the mountains, but as before this fulfilment is vague and nameless. Once more the narration refers to a “descent”. The hunters set up camp at the top of the valley, and then each day they head into it. Their aim is to slaughter and skin as many of the buffalo as they can.

A buffalo — However proud these beasts are when free to roam, dead and dying they have none of that grandeur to them. Death is emphatically deromanticised in *Butcher’s Crossing*, so that we see the hunters’ actions for what they really are – terrible, pointless, slaughter.

The killing is mechanised and pointless. Horror is something we need to imagine for ourselves, from sounds and images, like the sea of bones Miller talks about being left behind after the buffalo have been stripped and had time to decay. Williams’ characters don’t acknowledge it themselves. The buffalo they kill are strange creatures. It can happen that they go into what is called a “stand”, where they – deprived of a leader – refuse to move, even as they watch their brethren being slaughtered all around them.

“They just stand there and let him shoot them. They don’t even run.”

This happens in Butcher’s Crossing, again and again. Instead of showcasing nature’s nobility, we find nature’s stupidity, its incomprehension. The idealised joy of the hunt – of the chase, of the feeling of man vs beast – is relentlessly undermined by the way that the buffalo just let themselves die. And Miller is obsessive. He aims to clear the entire valley, killing thousands of buffalo even though they don’t have the space for all the skins on their wagon. His urge is frightening and destructive, but none of the other characters stand in his way. Instead, they watch and help. Andrews himself has a go with his own rifle, even as he admits to himself that “on the ground, unmoving, [the buffalo] no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before”.

The Mountains: Nature and Identity

What meaning can be found in this slaughter? Is this what Andrews wanted, what he needed? Butcher’s Crossing is not a book to tell us what to believe. In fact, it is brutally anti-ideological, destroying truths rather than trying to build them. Andrews, because he is searching for a meaning, is susceptible to the meaninglessness around him. Instead of filling the absent centre in his heart, the slaughter hardens it. It says that there is nothing good here, and the world is simply amoral, empty of any kind of truth. In some way, his journey reminds me of that of William in the first season of Westworld. In both cases, the person that we find in the search to find ourselves isn’t who we wanted to be at all. But by that point it’s already too late to change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a black and white photograph. Butcher's Crossing attacks many of his ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. His essay “Nature”, with its benevolent view of the natural world, is subject to an implicit attack in Butcher’s Crossing. Here nature is anything but peaceful.

Nature cannot passively take beatings forever. At some point, arbitrarily, the tide turns on the hunters in their mountain paradise. Snow begins to fall. And what once was going to be the easiest hunt of them all quickly descends into hell. With snow, there is no way out of the valley, and the same battle for survival that the men prepared for the buffalo, now nature prepares for them. And the battle is worth waiting for, though I shan’t spoil its outcome here. The climax of the book’s second act is something to behold. It takes the Western genre and builds from them something every bit as horrific and beautiful as Blood Meridian. But here it is a thousand times more real – and for that, perhaps even more frightening.

Conclusion

I read Stoner a whole ago, but for me Butcher’s Crossing is the better book. Everything about it is awesome. The style is a model worth studying, of clean sentences and powerful images, but what really sets it apart is the story. Butcher’s Crossing is an adventure, taking those simple Western tropes that many have taken before, but unlike those predecessors Williams’ builds from them a work that is thematically dense and demands close attention. Andrews’ story of self-discovery and its dangers is one that has only become more relevant as time has passed and our culture has moved more and more towards self-creation, and the story’s fundamental lesson – that the person we find in extreme situations is not “real us” so much as only a possible version of “us” – is one that everyone can learn from.

But most of all, Butcher’s Crossing is a Western – exciting, adventurous, and fun. It’s a joy to read, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Have you read Butcher’s Crossing or anything else by Williams? What do you make of him? Leave a comment below!

Dec 2020 Update: I have now also put up a review of Augustus, Williams’ unbelievably awesome final completed novel. I think it’s even better than Butcher’s Crossing.

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.