Started very promisingly with a foreword by the translator Michael Hoffman that wasn't at all hagiographic, and all the better for it as it came across as a fair and open assessment of Roth and his faults as a writer and as a person by a translator who has spent his life immersed in Roth's works. Roth sounds incredibly frustrating, an unreliable, difficult man who made life a misery for his publishers and even submitted chapters from previous books when he had a deadline to meet. I like the sound of him very much, but it seems as if he was only writing because he absolutely had to in order to pay the bills and he'd much rather be somewhere else. If course the somewhere else was an imaginary, idealised Habsburg mitteleuropa full of order, ceremony, cafes and people who knew their place. I'm now moving on to a book about Appalachia, and it got me thinking about what links those two areas that interest me so much - Central Europe under the Habsburgs and the backwoods country of the Eastern US. i wonder f it is because they are both backwaters, attached to but forgotten by the great flows of history, where old, archaic habits linger on and perhaps point to a different way of life. Where else fits that bill? Frinton-on-Sea I suppose, but I have no desire to ever go there.
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