The Radetzky March

I have been pretty quiet this week, because I devoted most of the last few days to reading The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth (pictured above).  I assigned it for East Meets West and, since I have wanted to read the novel for a long time, I decided I wanted to do it in German.  It's almost 400 pages in my German edition, so it was quite an undertaking.

But it was an excellent novel (and a perfect fit for East Meets West), and I'm glad I made myself do it.  The book tells the story of the last decades of the declining Habsburg Empire by focusing on a few generations of one family, the Trottas.  Early in the reign of Franz Joseph, a young Trotta saves the Kaiser's life at the Battle of Solferino by taking a bullet meant for his emperor.  In return, the Kaiser enobles him, and he becomes known as the "Hero of Solferino."  We see the rise and fall of his family in the persons of his son and grandson, whose lives overlap with Franz Joseph's reign, with the book ending during World War I with the Kaiser's death and, three days later, that of the middle Trotta (the grandson having already died in the war).

Roth does a marvelous job throughout the entire novel of creating a sense of impending doom amid the surface propriety and elegance of aristocratic and military life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the late 19th century.  While we focus on the Trottas' fortunes, in the background are gathering the nationalist and ideological forces that threaten the empire and ultimately erupt in war.

I have read some other things by Roth in the past, and I expected this to be good--it is considered his masterpiece, and anyone who works on turn-of-the-century Vienna encounters references to it constantly.  I was not disappointed!  But now I need to get back to everything else that I put on hold for a few days in order to plow through this.