Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
Keiron Pim
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
Keiron Pim
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Absorbing.
Absorbing.
Eloquent.
A claustrophobic epic, a portrait of the artist as a portrait of his age.
[Roth's] ingenious, tormented life is chronicled in English for the first time in Keiron Pim’s biography, Endless Flight — so comprehensive that it will be the authoritative account of Roth’s life for decades. We’ve had to wait this long because Roth’s isn’t the sort of life that can be charted by sitting in a library in Oxford.
Kieron Pim – using, in the main, secondary sources – brings all the details of this consistently creative but wretched life together in an engrossing fashion, giving all the historical context we might need to understand the flows of European politics at the time. His analysis of Roth’s novels is clear and convincing, free of fanciful conjecture..
Pim’s book is a little longer than it needs to be, swollen by multi-page plot summaries of each novel and slow to get off the blocks, but his effort to understand the man in full is profound and the result feels definitive. His research empowers him to be rigorously sceptical of a writer who was an unreliable historian of both the empire and his own life, telling outrageous lies about his war record, his education, his birthplace and, most significantly, his family..
Keiron Pim’s is the first English-language biography of Roth, and what a superb book it is – impeccably researched, extremely readable and, it must be said, grimly relevant in the wake of Putin’s assault on Ukraine. With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning.
[A] scrupulous account.
Keiron Pim’s elegant, detailed and judicious biography is the first comprehensive English-language introduction to an author whose astonishing literary talent consistently overrode the careless failures, debacles and staggering afflictions of his life.
Pim is particularly good on Roth’s Jewishness, his fascination with the east European Jews of his childhood, the antisemitism in wartime Galicia, in early 20th-century Vienna and, of course, in Nazi Germany.
Deeply considered, rigorously researched and brimming with fascinating details and insights, it situates the man and his work in their wider political and social context.
The story is staggeringly depressing. Marvellous as his novels are, Roth proves a bracingly horrible presence.