Weights and Measures (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Roth, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241307449 ISBN 13: 9780241307441

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2017

Synopsis

'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one'

At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man.

Translated by David Le Vay

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241307449
• ISBN 13: 9780241307441
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112