The Joseph Roth Collection: Book II: The Spider's Web, The Emperor's Tomb, April, Stationmaster Fallmerayer
Four works. One career. The full range of Joseph Roth.
In The Spider's Web - his first novel, serialized in 1923 - a mediocre, resentful veteran of the First World War discovers that in Weimar Berlin, ambition without conscience is the most reliable path to power. Written in cold, furious prose utterly unlike anything else Roth produced, it is the most prescient novel about the rise of fascism ever written - and it appeared two days before Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch.
In April: The Story of a Love Affair - brief, luminous, quietly devastating - a young man moves carelessly through a summer encounter that means everything to the woman and nothing to him. A story about the asymmetry of feeling, told with the restraint of a writer who trusts his reader entirely.
In Fallmerayer the Stationmaster - widely admired as one of the finest things Roth ever wrote - a man of complete ordinariness, defined entirely by routine and habit, encounters something unexpected at his railway station and discovers, too late, that he is capable of an absolute feeling. The discovery costs him everything.
In The Emperor's Tomb - his last completed novel, published in 1938, the year of the Anschluss - Franz Ferdinand Trotta watches the final extinction of the Austro-Hungarian world his family served, and goes to stand before the vault where the Habsburg emperors lie buried. One of the most quietly devastating endings in twentieth-century fiction.
By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.
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