The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars - Softcover

Roth, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783781289 ISBN 13: 9781783781287

Publisher: Granta Books, 2016

Synopsis

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.

About this title

About the Authors

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany and he died in poverty in Paris. His novels include What I Saw, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Right and Left, The Emperor's Tomb, The String of Pearls and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

Michael Hofmann is a poet. He has translated the works of many writers, including Brecht, Kafka, Fallada and Roth. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783781289
• ISBN 13: 9781783781287
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288