Weights and Measures
A short, brilliantly evocative novel set in the bleak eastern European borderlands before the First World War An artillery officer is persuaded by his resentful wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army to take up a civilian post as inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. At first attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is soon at a loss in a shadowy world of smugglers, profiteers and petty crooks. This great, painful novel is both a brilliant evocation of the remote reaches of eastern Europe before the catastrophe of the world wars and a frightening picture of the slow capitulation of a good man with traditional standards to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.
Author: Joseph Roth
Format: Paperback, 112 pages, 130mm x 198mm, 91 g
Published: 2017, Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom
Genre: General & Literary Fiction
A short, brilliantly evocative novel set in the bleak eastern European borderlands before the First World War An artillery officer is persuaded by his resentful wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army to take up a civilian post as inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. At first attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is soon at a loss in a shadowy world of smugglers, profiteers and petty crooks. This great, painful novel is both a brilliant evocation of the remote reaches of eastern Europe before the catastrophe of the world wars and a frightening picture of the slow capitulation of a good man with traditional standards to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.