The Tale of the 1002nd Night: A New Translation
Vienna, 1870s. The world, as Roth tells us, is deeply and frivolously at peace. The Shah of Persia has come to visit, on the advice of his philosophical Chief Eunuch, who recommends travel as the best cure for the conviction that variety might exist. Vienna receives him with the magnificent self-assurance of a civilization that does not yet know it is running out of time.
Baron Taittinger - cavalry officer, minor nobleman, chronically short of money, constitutionally incapable of foresight - is assigned to manage the Shah's entertainment. He does so with the casual irresponsibility of a man who has never once been required to consider consequences. The consequences, in this case, will be considerable. A string of pearls will change hands. A woman's life will be upended. And the social machinery of Habsburg Vienna will grind on, as elegant and as indifferent as ever.
The Tale of the 1002nd Night was the last novel Joseph Roth completed, written in exile in Paris as the world he loved was being destroyed, published in 1939 - the year of his death - and suppressed by the Nazis when they invaded the Netherlands the following year. It is his most formally playful work and one of his most moving: a comedy of manners that opens like a fairy tale and darkens, gradually and with great precision, into something far more searching.
By the author of The Radetzky March.
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