The first biography of he mercurial, self-mythologizing novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March.
Absorbing ... The last hundred or so pages of Endless Flight are difficult to get through. By the end of the 1930s, Roth was a bloated, portly wreck, shuffling along on feet swollen by drink ... Pim, though an unlikely contender for a Roth biographer (his first published book was about dinosaurs), proves a sensitive, judicious and perceptive guide. What elevates Endless Flight, beyond the pathos of its narrative, is Pim’s discussion of Roth’s writing. Whereas most biographies settle for the breezily abstract, Pim devotes page after page of close reading to almost all of Roth’s novels ... Pim also carefully navigates Roth’s complex politics and Habsburg nostalgia.
Absorbing ... Endless Flight is a welcome aid for people like me who can’t read Roth, or his critics and biographers, in German, and for any English-language readers who might want an introduction to his work. And now, more than ever, is the time to read him.
Eloquent ... One of the very few blemishes on Endless Flight is the sheer length of its plot summaries, many of which feel unnecessary, particularly where Roth’s best-known works are concerned ... Such minor quibbles notwithstanding, Pim has given us an authoritative and long-overdue life of an author whose pertinence to our contemporary times is both indisputable and unsettling.
