Roth’s other Trotta novel is understandably less celebrated than The Radetsky March. It’s a patchy, rangy book, which sweeps from pre-war Vienna and Slovenia through the protagonist’s participation in the war, imprisonment as a POW in Siberia, and then return to Vienna where he finds himself impoverished following the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. It feels like a 500 page novel squeezed into a hundred and something pages and doesn’t entirely hang together, no matter how fascinating the individual episodes might be. Nevertheless, the sections themselves, in particular the Siberian and post-war episodes offer an unusual vision of how these moments of history happened on a human scale. As a POW in Siberia, (an experience my great grandfather also supposedly shared), we see the ragged edges of a war which no-one is all that concerned about. Post-war Vienna, in Roth’s vision, has a curiously modern feel, where sexuality is fluid and artistic flavours of the month come and go. People try and fail to spin businesses out of nothing, which mostly fail. All of which feels very like the twenty first century.
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