The Legend of the Holy Drinker - Hardcover

Roth, Joseph; Hofmann, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701134801 ISBN 13: 9780701134808

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1989

Synopsis

Roth wrote this final novella shortly before his death in 1939. It is the story of the last weeks in the life of a Parisian alcoholic and convicted murderer. The book has been made into a film, which won the 1988 Palme D'Or at the Venice Film Festival.

About this title

Review

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was a superb writer whose compact yet lambent fiction deserves the highest praise (and a much wider readership). The Legend of the Holy Drinker, written and published in the year of his death, is a deeply affecting tale of Andreas, an alcoholic like Roth, who drinks himself to death in the rough houses of Paris.

Michael Hoffman's superb translation has rightly garnered much praise. Hoffman stresses that, although often esteemed for the simplicity of his style, Roth is no brutalist: it is the economy and the directness of his writing that is so moving and makes his work so special. Despite its melancholic subject matter The Legend is an uplifting novella.

Throughout the tale Andreas, previously an impoverished vagrant, is continuously visited by miraculous good fortune that illuminates the last days of his mendicant existence and lift him, and the reader, to a new understanding of his (our) dissolution. Roth was a peerless writer and Granta must be praised for bringing him back to our attention in such lovely volumes. --Mark Thwaite

Review

'Poignant.' --Daily Mail

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701134801
• ISBN 13: 9780701134808
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 64