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Summary: An unforgettable portrait of a dying family and empire.
Review: "The Radetzky March," first published in 1932, is a tragicomic elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs, as seen through the eyes of three generations of a family caught up in that empire's inexorable decline. From Baron Joseph von Trotta--a simple peasant soldier ennobled after saving Emperor Franz Joseph's life at the Battle of Solferino--the Trotta family's torch passes to son Franz, a dignified, meticulous, unimaginative regional official, and finally to grandson Carl Joseph, a decent, weak-willed young army lieutenant totally unsuited to the life he was forced into. Carl Joseph tumbles into drink and debt as ossified bureaucracy and resurgent nationalism pushes the far-flung, anachronistic empire toward its doom. Author Joseph Roth, though clear-eyed about the empire's many faults and injustices, nevertheless found it preferable to what came after it. (It is no surprise upon reading this novel to learn that Roth drank himself to death on the eve of the Nazi takeover of Europe.) While I have some questions about Joachim Neugroschel's translation--for example, did Roth really switch so haphazardly between the present and past tenses?--there is no denying the dark, poignant power of "The Radetzky March." The Everyman's Library hardcover edition includes an astute and illuminating introduction by Alan Bance, as well as a useful timeline of Roth's life.
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Summary: End of an Aera
Review: 1859. At the Battle of Solferino, the young lieutenant Trotta saves the life of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Henceforth he is a colonel and named the Baron von Trotta. The story continues to his son Franz, who becomes a government official as county governor in Bohemia/Galicia - and to his grandson Carl Joseph, who enters military service. It ends with Carl Joseph as a lieutenant in a second-rate chasseur regiment.During the intervening years, we watch the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy slowly disintegrate, just as the Trotta family goes from the Hero of Solferino to an officer of little account. Carl Joseph wished back to his grandfather, and the Emperor thinks back to when he was young. There are many characters in this book, drawn in magnificent three-dimensional detail, and all of them just as flawed as the Trotta family. The monarchy is eaten up from the inside by these government servants who have no goal and no drive, either spend their days gambling and drinking, or rapidly moving closer to some form of suicide. The author gives us magnificent descriptions of the times, the people, and their surroundings. It is a book that will haunt you for some time to come, not least because it is very sad and depressing.
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Summary: Truly great work!!
Review: The Radetzky March, first published in 1932, 16 years after the abdication of Habsburg rule is considered Joseph Roth's literary masterpiece. This work of fiction is craftily woven with allusion, allegory, irony, and foreshadowing throughout. It is a story of three generations of the Trotta family, their rise to nobility and demise with the empire. I truly enjoyed this book published some 68 years ago. Personally, I think it truly superiour to most fiction books of today. The book keeps the reader interacting with the story and with the period in which it takes place. I am indebted to my professor who recommended this book as one possible outside reading to the traditional texts. I HIGHLY recommend this this book!!!!!
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Summary: one of the overlooked great novels of the twentieth century
Review: a truly great book. often compared to his countryman and rough contemporary robert musil, roth in radetzky march at least more closely approaches tolstoy in his combination of historic sweep and close observation. sad, funny, sweet and tart with irony, roth conjures up the dwindling years of the hapsburgs with uncanny accuracy and deep sympathy. as you read, you watch a world die, first slowly, through administrative incompetence and intellectual ennui, then through catastrophic loss in war. a wonder of literature. god knows, there are few enough of them. read it. and read the rest of roth -- particularly "the emporer's tomb," a sort of sequel to this novel.
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Summary: Great Historical Fiction Book
Review: Although I hated the characters in this book, I loved learning about the old AH empire prior to WW II.
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Summary: A perfect work of art
Review: As others have written, this is truly a masterpiece, a great work, a neglected classic. After a 12-year interval, I recently read it for a second time. Roth's mastery of the prose in this book is astonishing on every page.
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Summary: Maria Vargas Llosa's favorite political novel
Review: Charlie Rose in a recent interview with Maria Vargas Llosa asked the famed Peruvian author/essayist/politician what was his favorite historical novel. This book was the one Llosa named. That's damned high praise, I think.
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Summary: An Austrian "War and Peace"
Review: Even the title of this spectacular novel is both wistful and tongue in cheek. Field marshal Count Radetzky had won his two battles against the Italians, but the Italian Risorgimento continued unabated all the same. By the time this novel starts at the battle of Solferino, a decade after Radetzky, the decay of the Habsburg Empire has been formally set in motion. All that is left of the field marshal's victories is the march composed in his honor by Johann Strauss Sr., rendered over and over by bands in the gazebos of an Empire in total denial of its inevitable doom. Like all great fiction, this novel has many layers and in the end all these layers form a whole from which a greater truth emerges. At one level, this is a record of the rise and fall of the Trottas, Slovenian peasants, who made it into the history books when lieutenant Joseph Trotta saved the life of the young Habsburg emperor at the battle of Solferino. He is rewarded with a knighthood and makes it to baron in due course. His elevated status destroys what there is left of his relation with his father, a war veteran himself, who lost an eye when serving under Radetzky, in an age when promotions didn't come this fast. In any society, the father-son relation is complicated and ridden with potential conflict. These conflictual aspects get further exacerbated under the rigid customs of Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. As the father-son relation keeps changing through four generations of Trottas, so do the relations of all these fathers and sons to the supreme father figure, the long lived Emperor Franz Joseph himself. Ultimately Austria appears as a "country of grandsons" driven by their fathers to the impossible task of living up to an officially sanctioned mythical image of their grandfathers, a clear prescription for the disaster which followed. At a different level this book explores the rigid set of rules underlying the organization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With its many national groups and social castes, this empire could only function with a well defined set of rules in place. The rigidity and immutability of these outdated rules give rise to absurd situations, such as a senseless duel between a regiment's physician, a near-sighted Jew, and a heavy drinking career officer, they both meet their deaths. Even at the highest level, His Apostolic Majesty's own exalted status derives directly from a divine right in an era when religion is becoming ever more irrelevant to his subjects. The absence of the slightest evolution in these rules, necessarily produces some bizarre "loopholes". In a society in which honor and morals are handed down from generation to generation, aging aristocratic beauties do not lose their standing in society even as they indulge in the kind of promiscuity one would normally associate with a cavalry officer. The whole love life of the fourth generation lieutenant Trotta has him cast as the sex object of sexually voracious married women. In between these women, hard liquor consumed in large enough quantities to qualify the lieutenant as a full-fledged alcoholic and gambling are used to help him deny the hopelessness of his situation. For after all, as a professional soldier he should be eagerly awaiting a war in which to prove his worth, while at the same time knowing that such a war could not possibly end without sweeping out of existence the very Empire for which he would be risking his life. Stylistically this novel is a veritable tour de force. Nature, objects, tears, sweat, the sun the stars, the Ukrainian swamps all follow their own courses, and have their own agendas, as if alive. They create the doom-laden yet sheltered environment of the Habsburg monarchy. This is not to say the novel is flawless. The gambling and the duel scenes seem to come directly out of a Thirties' movie and the behavioral fluctuations of the fourth generation lieutenant Trotta --- now extremely decent and insightful, now outright criminal, as when he orders the soldiers under his command to shoot on unarmed strikers--- seem to come somewhat out of the blue. But then, a senseless existence can lead to senseless acts. At the same time there are some scenes of supreme beauty. Foremost amongst these are Dr. Skowronnek's prophetic confession about his children whom he perceives as "aliens from a time yet to come, their time ...." and in whose round and rosy sleeping faces he sees "a lot of horror,... the horror of their time, the future.... ." which he hopes never to have to live through. No less powerful is the young lieutenant's visit with the polite, but ultimately emotional widower, to whose recently deceased wife the lieutenant had lost his virginity. Rarely has a major historic event been so beautifully brought to life. Lev Tolstoy's "War and Peace" comes to mind and there is no doubt, "The Radetsky March" belongs in this exalted company.
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Summary: Marching into the Twentieth Century
Review: Every Sunday the strains of the Radetsky March are heard outside the residence of Baron von Trotta, son of the lieutenant who saved Emperor Franz Joseph's life at Solferino and father of Lieutenant Carl Joseph who saves the Emperor's portrait from a whorehouse. (Thus have times changed!) As this book narrates the saga of four generations of the von Trotta family and the parallel decline of Franz Joseph's Austro-Hungarian Empire, the strains of this march dwindle until it, too, is finally obliterated. Roth's masterpiece touches us as he deftly depicts the disillusionment that inevitably replaces the once-elevated code of honor of an outdated Empire. The book's style, that of an omniscient author reminiscent of nineteenth-century aesthetics, complements its subject. Here is a glimpse of a world where military and social rank dictate behavior, where women are seductresses regardless of social pretenses, where servants are endowed with unquestioning loyalty, where Jews live on the fringes of society yet must also subscribe to its rigorous decorum. Yet, as the exploits of the youngest von Trotta illustrate, this world has become decadent in its rigidity. For the von Trottas, as for the Hapsburgs themselves, this discovery comes at a time when one cannot escape its consequences. For it is the rhythms of the Radetsky March, along with the portrait of the Hero of Solferino (whose heroism is not all that it was made out to be) that shaped even the youngest von Trotta and remain forever in the background, preventing a return to the family's peasant heritage and the romanticism of a more idyllic existence. Roth's book is well worth the read. It is especially endowed with a gentle irony that bespeaks compassion without indulging in sentimentality. For those of us still trying to understand what formed the Western world of the twentieth century, it abounds with all the poignant music, imagery, and people of pre-World War I conditions in Eastern Europe.
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Summary: A neglected masterpiece
Review: I am happy to see Roth's epic novel of the end of a world finally beginning to get its due. The story is well-told, full of elegiac sadness and irony. I particularly like the gradual degeneration of the Trotta family, which parallels that of the Habsburg Empire--see, for example, the scene where the last of the Trottas "saves" Franz Josef by turning his picture to the wall in a brothel. Of course, you really should read it in the original German. . .
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