Product Description

The wisdom of a lost generation distilled in a bottle of Calvados.

At one time an underground hero in the world of journalism, with prose on a par with Tolstoy and Kafka, Joseph Roth now looms large in the pantheon of European literature. Indeed, the last five years have seen a major Roth revival culminating in Report from a Parisian Paradise, a haunting epitaph by the greatest foreign correspondent of his age. An exile in Paris, Roth captured the essence of France in the 1920s and 1930s. From the port town of Marseille to the erotic hill country around Avignon, Report from a Parisian Paradise—superbly translated by Michael Hofmann—paints the sepia-tinted landscapes, enchanting people, and ruthless desperation of a country hurtling toward dissolution. Roth's book is not only a paean to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work of transcendent philosophical clarity. 6 illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271020 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Joseph Roth was a master of the feuilleton, the genre that, always in highly individual fashion, comprises some mix of travelogue, reportage, short story and cultural and political commentary. The genre truly flourished in the 1920s and, more somberly, in the exile from Nazi-dominated Germany of the 1930s. Roth left Germany in 1925 for France, where he seems to have felt more at home. Paris dazzled him, and it shows in his writing, but the reports from the provinces are even more spectacular. Roth is captivated by the light of the south and its heady ethnic mix, by the traces of history he finds in the cathedral of Avignon and the pulsing activity on the Marseilles docks. In Lyons he finds silk workers whose very souls reflect the "shiny, luminous, glowing threads" with which they work every day. Lively, happy France is Roth's foil for a Germany where there is no fun to be had and everyone thinks in categories. In Paris, eastern European Jews can live as they please, and no one pays much attention to French anti-Semites. Roth's observations were not always accurate, but no matter. It is his acute sense for sights, sounds and smells, his insightful intelligence and, most of all, his sparkling prose, captured so well by Michael Hofmann's English, that are important. This volume is an excellent companion to the compilation of Roth's Berlin dispatches, What I Saw, published by Norton last year. It is a joy to read, even when the events turn grim. 40 illus. not seen by PW.
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From Booklist
Roth moved to Paris from 1920s Berlin (the venue for his journalism collected in What I Saw, 2002). He sent German readers of newspapers such as Frankfurter Zeitung these observations of their late enemy. Roth became entranced with France and wrote of it in an imaginative manner that was allusive rather than direct, evocative rather than descriptive. Roth's dispatches from the cities of the Rhone Valley and Provence, for example, elliptically call forth their histories--Roth never bluntly declaims, in guidebook fashion, that popes resided at Avignon or Romans at Nimes. Rather, Roth paints from their ruins and the faces of the living inhabitants a pointillist picture of the past. The paradoxically indistinct yet precise style extends to his pictures of the Parisian bistro scene, to his tour of the Somme battlefield, and to his book reviews as well, which don't so much lay down opinions as build layers of satire and irony. A laconic but trenchant stylist, Roth remains worth reading for the singular way he imparts the ambience of Europe between wars. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Personal, lyrical and highly perceptive. -- New York Times

[Roth] arranges the elements of the vision...in a shining constellation. -- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Incandescent
A true gift for anyone that loves writing, observation, and life, and an absolute gem for anyone that has ever been to or loved France. Heartbreakingly intelligent, perceptive, and compassionate writing from a master. Get this for yourself and all those you love (since you won't want to part with your copy).

Joseph Roth in Paris


We are in the midst of a Roth Renaissance--no, not Phillip, but Joseph, who in an all too brief career from 1921-1939 established himself as the greatest newspaper correspondent of his age.

His reports from and about Weimar Berlin (1921-1933), "What I Saw" are minutely observed, sharply etched portraits of the "demimondaine" life of a city that boasted 120 newspapers, 40 theaters and great symphonies--a magnet for the aspiring composers, actors and journalists living side-by-side with the emerging Nazi monster.

As the goosesteps of the black-booted Nazis became progressively louder, the wary Jewish journalist exiled himself to safety in France in 1925. Fifty of his Parisian gems, written between 1925-1939 can be found in "Report From A Parisian Paradise"

As an ardent Francophile you will appreciate Roth's letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper almost immediately upon arriving in Paris in which he explains that he is in "complete control of his skeptical intelligence" and though risking "sounding moronic",

"Paris is the capital of the world and you must come here. No one who hasn't been here can claim to be more than half human. Every cab driver here is wittier than our authors. I love all of the women here, even the oldest of them to the point of contemplating matrimony."

Even when describing the aftermath of unimaginable horror in this description of Maisonette, 'the most terrible battlefield on the Somme his poetic voice is resonant:

"The earth was turned over, spattered with chunks of limestone, and with mud that oozed up from the depths. There wasn't a blade of grass or vegetation. Millions of shells rained down. A division clung for months to a hillside. And in the distance they saw the silver water of the Somme, and behind it the shining red roofs of Péronne, and on the left the green, blooming land--the other country, enemy country, that they yearned for as for a woman.

Now larks fizz through the air; the rain has stopped; the wind has blown away the clouds. Anyone who didn't see the war would think this was peace. But I can sense red blood running through the veins of the surviving trees, though the clumps of earth, in the delicate filaments of the leaves... Bent over the landscape, like a general over a map, is God. Unapproachable as a general; remote as a general..."

Back in Paris he observes children at play in the Jardin du Luxembourg and remarks that:

"French children behave with the ease and confidence of grown-ups. It's not so much a matter of race and blood as it is the consequence of the warm, loving, nurturing softness in the way they are brought up. The French pedagogical principle is not Spartan strictness but Roman freedom accorded to the individual disposition--it's not discipline but civilization."

And as a critic of the newly evolving film with sound he is smitten with René Clair's classic "Sous Les Toits de Paris (1930)" He writes:

"The action of this film emerges from the atmosphere of Paris in much the same way as a folk song is generated by a particular landscape. It's as though the tremulous, unresting fog over the roofs of Paris gave birth to the events that take place below."

Roth's ability to extract the essence of an event or scene and report it with elegant clarity would be exemplary in a seasoned reporter or novelist but remarkable in a man who did some of his best writing between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five--an old soul in a young body.

And when viewed from the prism of 2004, "Report From a Parisian Paradise" is even more astonishing for what it foresaw.