Product Description
Mendel Singer, a modern day Job, goes through his trials in the ghettoes of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York. He loses his family, falls terribly ill, and is badly abused. He needs a miracle. ... Read more

Product Description
A powerful fable set in the early days of the Russian Revolution, Tarabas is the story of a Russian peasant who learns in his youth from a gypsy that it is his destiny to be both a murderer and saint. It is Roth's special gift that, in Tarabas's fulfillment of his tragic destiny, the larger movements of history find their perfect expression in the fate of one man. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

"Sinner and Saint?"
Tarabas, the antihero of Joseph Roth's short, intense novel, is, without doubt, a manifold 'sinner'.A young Russian officer, returning from a leisure life in New York to Eastern Europe, throws himself with great vigour into war action in 1914.He had been banned from his Galician home by his strict and powerful father, following some serious misdemeanours, politically and private.While in New York, a gypsy fortune teller predicts that he will be a "murderer and a saint" and that he will "sin and atone during his lifetime". This prophecy, woven like a red thread through the story, engraves itself into the young man's consciousness, increasingly influencing his actions.In this novel, published in 1934, the author compresses the many-sided realities of war and its fallout on a local population, into powerful and at times exquisitely crafted scenarios, mostly centred in and around one village Koropta in an unnamed, newly independent, country.

How much can a fortune foretold guide a person's actions? Following Tarabas life at the end of the war, the answer is: very much indeed. The swift transformation of by now 'Oberst' (Colonel) Tarabas from sinner to (not-quite) saint, when and why it happens, is as doubtful as it is essential for the totality and importance of the novel.But then, plausibility is evidently not of great concern to Roth here. At one level, and a fundamental one, the novel reads like a parable of human behaviour and morals during war and occupation, exemplified by Tarabas's excesses in both. At another level, the novel excels in highly realistic and detailed description of the circumstances in Koropta and the surrounding farms, that lead to a pogrom against the Jewish population in thevillage. Painful as it is to read, this section stands out in its heart wrenching intensity and power. Last but not least, in his portraits of the likes of Tarabas himself, his father, the General and, especially Tarabas's Jewish counterparts, inn-keeper Kristianpoller and sexton Shemarjah, Roth develops vivid characters that are difficult to forget.

For me, this was my first foray into Joseph Roth's work, not having attempted to read his acknowledged masterwork, THE RADETZKY MARSH, published in 1932, until now. Roth, a liberal Jewish Austrian journalist living in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, left Germany in 1933 and died prematurely in 1939 in Paris at the age of 45. TARABAS was his first work published in exile. While he wrote somewhat disapprovingly about his novel later to a friend, it remains an important and deeply affecting piece of writing for the historical moment in time and with food for reflection far beyond its time.[Friederike Knabe]

`Here rests Colonel Nikolaus Tarabas: a guest on this earth.'
Tarabas tells the story of the restless life of Colonel Nikolaus Tarabas.Exiled to America by this father, for taking part in anti-Czarist activities, Tarabas becomes jealous over a woman and seriously injures a bar owner in a drunken rage.`The hearts of foolish, easily intoxicated people are impenetrable.'

A gypsy has predicted that Tarabas will be both a murderer and a saint.Thinking that the bar owner is dead, Tarabas uses the declaration of the Great War as an opportunity to flee America to join the Russian military.Here, as the Great War becomes the Revolution, Tarabas again commits an act of violence, this time against a Jewish man.

Again he flees.This time, as a beggar trying to atone for his sins, he eventually finds peace when the Jewish man forgives him.
While the main themes of the novel are crime and punishment, guilt and forgiveness, it is Tarabas'srestlessness and inability to settle and to really belong anywhere that has stayed with me.Yes, Tarabas is guilty of inhumanity, but he is not alone.I find this novel thought-provoking, bleak and unsettling: I love it.I am tempted to reread Dostoevsky to seek out parallels with both `Crime and Punishment' and `The Idiot'. But the reread will have to wait.There are a number of Joseph Roth novels to read first.

`A new generation is growing up which knows nothing of the old story.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

The Legend of the Holy Murderer
This was Roth's first novel published in exile, 1934. It is his usual compact version of material that could fill a 500 page novel. It was received with mixed comments. The less positive voices said it gave too little structure to too much material.
It is not a very complex story, but it is a very difficult story to digest. Our antihero Nikolaus Tarabas is a thoroughly dislikable man. He grew up a Russian citizen from a rich family in the Western regions of the Czar's empire. In the course of events his home region becomes an independent country but never receives a name from Roth. We learn that the region is Catholic and has a large Jewish minority.

Before NT found his calling as a ruthless and efficient front officer in war, he had a phase as a student in St.Petersburg, where he joined a political group and got caught in the preparation of an assassination. He was lucky to get away and immigrated to the US. There he became a violent and jealous drinker, got himself into trouble, (a Gypsy fortune teller has predicted that he will become a murderer and then a saint), and was lucky that WW1 broke out. He volunteered for the Russian army, went home, joined in his reserve lieutenant's uniform, was an excellent officer, made it to a captaincy.

Then revolution comes and makes him redundant. He is sent home. With 26 of his soldiers he offers himself to his new country and gets hired as a colonel with the task to build a regiment. He is not good at greater tasks though. His peak is over and he learns that soon.
He gets posted to a town that is much afraid of peace. War was bad enough, but what now, what horrors are going to come now?
The town has a Jewish population. NT is a man with deeply rooted anti-Semitic feelings.

At this time, the narrative slows down. While most events so far were told as if in fast forward mode, now we watch the unfolding of events that lead to a pogrom, in slow motion. Key event is the discovery, by rebellious soldiers, that a wall in a Jewish pub has a painting of the Virgin Mary under its plaster. The Mother of God has descended on us! Good catholic peasants and soldiers start a riot which leads to a pogrom.

By this time, NT is already a half broken man. He has started to doubt himself, his abilities and his role in life. When he commits an act of personal cruelty against a Jew during the crisis, he breaks down and breaks out of his life pattern. He becomes a repentant sinner and a vagrant. He dies in a monastery after reassuring himself that the victim of his cruelty has forgiven him.

The novel has two main streams of narrative: the `sin and redemption' story is set in a background narrative of the `peace to end all peace' history of the post WW1 experience in Central and Eastern Europe. Roth is often misunderstood as preaching nostalgia for the lost days of Kakania. Not so. He was a lamenter of the horrors that came after the relative stability of the pre WW1 world.
The tale of the anti-Semitic riots serves as a focal point for the novel and for NT's life. It is a brilliant piece of prose. Jewish/Catholic conflicts are part of the broader picture that Roth paints.

I wonder why Roth abstained from giving the new country a name. We all know that it is likely to be Poland (though it might also be Lithuania). Roth was from the Austrian part of Poland after all. Many of his stories are rooted in Galicia. This one here is deliberately vague about its site.
Is this novel among Roth's great achievements? All in all I would say no, but it deserves 5 stars any day.

Another Holy Sinner
Nicholas Tarabas... the monk Hildebrandt, Siddhartha, Parzifal, Goethe's particular Faust, and a host of lesser examples would make one suspect that Germans and German writers have always been obsessed with the Mitteleuropean "Three Rs": Repentance, Renunciation, and Redemption. Of course, book-worthy repentance has to be prefaced by vivid sins; Tarabas's sins are chiefly of violence - beginning with a simple fist fight but crescendoing to a horrific pogrom - and drunkenness. His renunciation, however, is total, an excruciating commitment to suffering and squalor described in achingly credible detail. And his redemption is ambiguously impersonal, posthumous, useless to anyone except as an icon. Truly, everything about Tarabas - the character and the book - is iconic and archetypal; one might almost suspect that Joseph Roth had been studying Karl Jung.

Tarabas is a young Russian of good and wealthy family, a university student who is expelled for semi-serious anti-Tsarist activity. He spends some aimless years in America, then returns to Russa at the beginning of World War 1 to become a ruthlessly effective 'front' officer, a veritable devil of a fighter. The Russian Revolution complicates his story, deprives him of his self-satisfaction as a fighter. He becomes an officer without a war in a fragment country which may be Belarus. Eventually, bad gets worse, he presides over a pogrom without being sober enough to grasp the situation, he commits an act of violence against a harmless Jewish idiot that somehow awakens him to his own degradation.

Joseph Roth wasn't in fact German. He was a Jew from the eastern fringe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His descriptions of Tarabas's anti-semitism, and the anti-semitism ofTarabas's world, must have been monstrously painful to write. But Tarabas is a Christian of sorts, and Roth frames his story of 'redemption' in essentially Christian mystical terms.

There's a huge ambivalence in this tale; the author wears a three-cornered hat of Judaism, folklorish mysticism, and outright skepticism. I reckon that it's the intellectual tension of Roth's ambiguity that makes this book worth reading... that, and the stunningly beautiful prose, sentence after sentence. Ordinarily, this is a genre of fiction that doesn't compel my interest, but how could I not be compelled by writing like this:
"In the out-house where the miracle had occurred two candles had now been lighted. They were stuck upon a log of wood and lit the Virgin's face with their uncertain flame.... The candles, continually renewed -- no one could tell were they came from; it was as though every peasant had brought candles with him to Koropta -- shed shadow rather than light. A solemn darkness reigned within the room, a darkness of which the candles were the shining core...." Into this luminous darkness, in a few moments of prose, the Jews of Koropta will be dragged pathetically and forced to worship a painting of the Mother of Jesus while being spit upon, kicked, defiled, vilified... after which they will be herded back to their ghetto to be beaten to death or incinerated in the fires that will destroy their homes.

Does Roth's writing remind anyone else of Bela Bartok's music? If you don't know Bartok, the comparison will be useless, but if you do, it may be telling: the amplification of a folksong/folk tale, the simplest of material, by means of sophisticated harmonies and resonances; the harsh passion; the relentless impetus. In these ways, "Tarabas" very much resembles Roth's "Job", a novel that blends 'shetl' humor and Biblical desolation, and both novels remind me a lot of Bartok's opera "Bluebeard". On the other hand, Roth's greatest novel, The Radetsky March, is constructed on a totally different pattern, without any of the Bartokian romanticism, a large-canvas historical novel rationally analyzing the collapse of the multi-ethnic Hapsburg order. Roth was, in my opinion, one of the very finest fictionalists of the 20th Century, whose work is just now coming to the attention of English-speaking readers. ... Read more

Product Description
Der Autor beschreibt den Leidensweg eines jüdisch-orthodoxen Dorfschullehrers eines Schtetls in Ostgalizien um 1900. Die Hauptfigur Mendel Singer treffen innerhalb kürzester Zeit so viele Schicksalsschläge, dass sein gesamtes Weltbild zerbricht und er beginnt, an Gott und seiner Allmacht und Erhabenheit zu zweifeln. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

If it wasn't for real bad luck...
... Mendel Singer wouldn't have no luck at all. He is a poor teacher in Russia's Far West, near the Austrian border, in the early 20th century. He has a happy family in its limited way, until the 4th child is born a cripple and handicapped. Harmony breaks. The wife becomes an emotional stranger. (You are stupid, because you teach children. You give them your knowledge and they give you their stupidity! Many thousands of sentences have been written, but you always remember the wrong ones!)
The other children grow up and drift away. First son joins the Czar's army..., what a debacle for good Jewish parents. Second son, to avoid the same fate, deserts to America (using the same snakehead that Roth readers know from Radetzkymarsch and also from False Weight). Daughter loses herself and becomes a loose woman. When she is seen going with a Cossack, her parents know it is time to go to America too, leaving poor crippled Menuchim behind.
But that is only the start of the trouble.

What we have in this moving, endearing, tragic, beautiful real-life fairytale is a combination of a Jewish Ugly Duckling with an American Dream story, all mixed into the biblical original.
It is probably Roth's most Jewish book (I don't know all that many of his writings, yet, actually). I think it is a vast improvement over the Old Testament version of Job.
It was published in 1930, so the Holocaust does not play into the story. Antisemitism is of course an essential part of the historical background (see the Cossack antagonism), but we are more exposed to the Jewish side of the coin: the fear and rejection of all things non-Jewish, be they government officials, army officers, lovers of unruly daughters. When Mendel is at his lowest, the worst that he can think of to punish the evil god for all the misery that he has caused him is: to go to the Italians and eat pork. That will teach him!

The Biblical Job Had It Good...
... in comparison to the much more human, and humane, Mendel Singer, the 'simple man' whose life is the story of Joseph Roth's novella. The original Job is possibly the finest Hellenic drama in the diverse collection of writings English speakers call the Old Testament. In it, the vainglorious, capricious tyrant Jehovah sadistically torments his pet 'Hamster sapiens' Job to test his submissiveness. That Job is not mentioned explicitly in Roth's novella until nearly the end, when Mendel Singer has been tormented by misfortunes to the point of trying to "kill" God by burning his Jewish prayer shawls and scriptures. Then it's his neighbors and friends who make the connection.

"Job" begins in a village in Russia before the Revolution. The first few pages set the American reader of today up for another Fiddler on the Roof tale of 'städl' Jewry, and then for a realistic novel of immigration like 'The Bread Winners.' But Roth's novella goes its own way, into a poetic parable of grief. I seldom shed tears on the pages of a fiction, but I felt I might, as Singer's suffering reached its trough.

In the end, the surprise that one has expected all along does occur. Honestly, if you haven't expected the 'miracle' all along, you're no kind of reader, so I'm not really 'spoiling' anything to tell you that Mendel will be 'exalted' and the beneficence of God will be reaffirmed. The 'surprise' for me, a skeptic, is that I'm amenable to such a conclusion, in fact that I'm profoundly touched with joy at Mendel Singer's spiritual resurrection.

I strolled into a 'brick-and-mortar' bookstore some weeks ago, to buy one book at full retail price just to maintain some anachronistic loyalty to the act of physically browsing. I looked at the R fiction shelves and found a dozen titles by Philip Roth but nothing by Joseph Roth. I tried to point out the inadequacy to the owner of the shop, a guy who knows me well, but he merely shrugged. Joseph Roth, dear readers, is one of the giants of 20th C literature. 'Job' is a radically different genre from Roth's profound 'Radetsky March' - more a lyric than an epic - but it has all the subtle powers of characterization that make Roth so great.

A Beautiful Book
One of the most beautifully written novels of the Twentieth Century. It is a simple story about suffering, love and loss in the life of a Russian Jew. There are moments of quiet and solemn heartbreak. We witness the slow, subtle fragmentation of a man's life, his family and yet all is not lost.

I deeply love German literature and the works of Roth are intelligent and equally moving. His prose is tender, simple and yet there is so much compassion and depth in his composition one is left feeling both glorious and tearful at the end. This is the book to reach for to regain faith in life and one's life path. When you read it and finish it, pass it on to loved ones. The story of Mendel is the story of an everyman in all of us.

Hopefully I will be able to read the original in German one day. The translation is inspiring.

Job
A book so beautifully wrought, so poetically driven,
so simple in its profound telling of sadness, despair and
redemption. Read this and be rewarded with the
memory of Mendel which, hopefully, will accompany
you all your years

Great story telling
Joseph Roth uses the style of Yiddish story telling to retell the ancient story of Job. This is a beautiful and poignant story in which all the characters are fully drawn and recognizable from our own lives. Since reading this book, I've gone on to read all Roth's works of fiction. I wish we had writers of his quality today. ... Read more

Product Description
Unavailable for over seventy years and long out of print in English, The Antichrist is the most mysterious, if not bizarre, of Roth's works, one that has long baffled even some of his many devotees. A dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic, it was written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, composed in cafes across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Apocalyptic Howl!
One thing you can't say against Joseph Roth as a writer is that he was predictable. He was the supreme improvisor, and each of his books explored a different riff. He was never a lapidary polisher; neither consistency nor cohesion mattered to him as much as to readers like me, trained in pre-post-modern exegesis. "The Antichrist" is as bizarre and uninterpretable as any book since the Revelations of Saint John. That is, it's "uninterpretable' in the sense that anyone's interpretation will totally fail to match anyone else's. Stylistically, it's a "Jeremiad", a prophetic warning replete with symbols and allegories. Surely Roth had Biblical models in mind. But its content -- as far as I can grasp it -- seems remarkably close to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".

In 1934, when Roth wrote "The Antichrist", he certainly had cause to howl. That must have been just about the time when he realized the full extent of the catastrophe impending in Europe, the moment when he had to acknowledge that his own worst fears, as expressed in early books, were about to be fulfulled. It was probably the time when he started to see himself as an exile-for-life from German lands and German readerships, rather than an international journalist/traveler. I'm guessing here; I haven't studied Roth biographically. But I suspect that "The Antichrist" was written in a frenzy of despair and depression, aggravated by the prospect of abject poverty and fumed by alcohol. I don't KNOW that Roth scribbled the manuscript on the napkins of a Parisian bar all in one sudden, sodden scrawl, but it has that sort of demoniac intensity ... and that utter disregard for the reader's rationality.

Roth begins dramatically: "The Antichrist has come; so disguised that we, who have been expecting him for years, cannot recognize him." That's a challenge, of course...a challenge to the reader to indeed recognize the aforesaid. I warn you, however, that there are more clues to unravel about the identity of Roth's Antichrist than in any detective thriller ever written. Just we you feel certain that Roth means "statism" to be the Antichrist, he throws you a curve and implies that 'capitalism', "gold", or 'industrial urbanization', or 'the cinema', or 'modernism in any form', or simple 'secularism' might be the fiend incarnate. Let's face it; the book is an inspired rant, a diatribe fueled by anguish and alienation. The "Antichrist" is eventually 'everything that's wrong' with Roth's society.

Once the 'howl' has reached full decibels, Roth leads us through a semi-narrative account of his own life: a young villager drafted in the army, a fervid Communist, a disillusioned still-half Communist journalist, a secular Jew made conscious of his Jewishness by the rise of fascist anti-semitism, a highly successful and prospering international journalist, a man without a country or a job. Journalism -- his employer, "The Master of a Thousand Tongues" -- bodes fair to be The Antichrist or at least a henchman thereof. In his quest to expose the Antichrist wherever he lurks, Roth takes us to the USSR, the USA, and to Nazi Germany, and lo! he finds his Enemy in all three. If anything, his denunciations of the Antichrist at work in the USA are the most ferocious in the book. Hollywood - Unholywood - is pure degradation, the spewer of illusions and unreality. Oil is the fluid of oppression; rather than flowing as wealth to the poor and hopeful, it flows from them like their blood of life toward the vast vats of consolidated wealth. Roth's vision of America is of a rolling ghost town along an endless highway.

What to make of Roth's purported conversion to Christianity? This book seems to demand that one take the question seriously, though frankly I'd rather not. I'd rather stick to the Joseph Roth I can understand, the humanist, the empathetic observer of lives as diverse as the characters in his best novellas. One of the avatars of the Antichrist denounced in this strange sermon of a book is "Fear". In fact, "Fear" is what prevents humans from recognizing both the Antichrist as such and the Humanity of other humans. If only "Fear" could be assuaged, Peace might have a chance to prevail. But I can't help suspecting that Roth himself was the helpless prey of Fear, especially at the time of writing this book, and that Fear was what he mistook for a religious impulse in himself.

My five-star rating for this book is purely a tribute to Roth as a supreme master of words, one of the greatest writers of his century. I can't recommend this book on any other terms. ... Read more

Product Description
This book, one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject-matter. The Legend of the Holy Drinker was tumed into a film by Enrico Olmi, starring Rutger Hauer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

What is the meaning of such a story?
"The Legend of the Holy Drinker" is a translated title of Joseph Roth's last piece of writing. How accurate is this translation? Keenly so, barely? This is just one of so many questions I have about this little (40 pages) book, yet here I am, attempting to write a review--blindly, metaphorically speaking-- of the last written work of what I now know as a significant writer of the twentieth century.

First, why choose the last writing of a significant writer? As a 30-year veteran of the classroom--and an English teacher at that, I tried to teach that a piece of literature does not come from a vacuum--that it has context. It helps the reader to be acquainted with that context--writer's life, times, and circumstances, historical era and its influences politically, philosophically, economically, and so on--if he/she plans to critique accurately. I don't know the context of "The Holy Drinker," except that Roth died the same year he wrote this--at age 44. Just as the main character, Roth drank himself to death. So that's all the context I have.

In addition to context, two other ways of approaching a work of literature (but certainly not the only methods) are work as a thing in itself and reader response, the second relying on the reader's personal reaction to the work regardless of any context.

What I bring to this review is an extensive prior knowledge pool built from both formal education and extensive reading on my own. Add to that basis a vivid imagination. I am approaching Holy Drinker as a thing in itself. So? Let's see how accurate my interpretation of meaning is--keenly so, barely?

1. Title--legend: a historically-based, psychologically-informed story of a person who represents the culture from which he comes. Legends can hold miracles only if the miracles are actually possible. (Definition is paraphrased from Wikipedia.)
Holy drinker--now there's quite an oxymoron!
While a title can provide clues to meaning, I surely will wait until the end of the review to make my comments.

2. Andreas is the title character who has been living under bridges for some time, lost in the world of drink and dissipation. In fact, when he sees his reflection in a mirror, he is shocked. He looks awful! He decides to get a shave before he has breakfast in this nice restaurant.

3. Where does he get his money? It's a miracle, albeit one of those believable ones. An elderly, apparently wealthy man gives him 200 francs after approaching Andreas in the area of the bridges where both sleep. The older gentleman has become a Christian and vowed a life of poverty--thus is giving away his money--a bit at a time. He asks only one favor in return. Because the Saint Therese of Lisieux is the catalyst for his conversion, he wants Andreas to return his money to the priest of the little church where the statue of Therese stands. So far this part of the story is believable--far-fetched, yes, but believable.

4. A number of "miraculous" things occur during the story, each more unbelievable, yet definitely possible. One is a chance (remember there is a controller in this story and it is the author) meeting with Caroline, his former girlfriend who led him to ruin.

5. Ruin. Thus we get to the crux of the story. Dissipation, dissolution, ruin.
Some would say Andreas caused his own ruin--life as a homeless man sleeping under bridges--because of alcoholism.

6. Addiction: --from Wikipedia.
Bottom line: Without acknowledging or even knowing that he has an addiction, despite all these miracles that come to him that could help change his life for the better, Andreas cannot act positively. He has an addiction, but one that the author does not acknowledge at any time in the story. Not once. Context: Roth was an alcoholic. Nay, he was a drinker. The term "alcoholic" is not introduced in the story. Without admitting to having a problem, a person cannot change it.

7. Title: Holy Drinker. Andreas is given the opportunity to repay the saint Therese of Lisieux. He promises but something always happens to prevent the repayment until the very end when payment--of sorts--is finally made. Holy Drinker.

8. Blame. There is none. My sister introduced an expression, now frequently spoken in my family: It is what it is. That seems to be Roth's take on drinking. It is what it is and nothing more.

As for my review, is it keenly accurate or barely? It is what it is.

Bright lights, big city (with spoiler warning!)
People get used to miracles if they experience 2 or 3 in a row. Miracles will be expected as a norm. And so it goes for Andreas Kartak, an illegal immigrant in Paris, 1934, from Poland. He came as a coal miner, ran into trouble, did jail time. Now his papers have expired, he lives under the bridges, drinks. A stranger gives him 200 Francs and asks him to repay, if he can, to Sainte Therese at a specified church. Andreas is an honorable bum and tries his best, running from miracle to miracle until he miraculously drops dead in the saint's church with the right amount of money for her.

This was Joseph Roth's last piece of writing and what a miracle job it is. I apologize for disclosing the conclusion, but in a 40 pages text, suspense can hardly be the motive for reading.

Last Installment of the "Legenda Aurea"...
... the Medieval 'Lives of the Saints.' This 40-page story, not even long enough to be called a novella, was Joseph Roth's last work, written in his last unhealthy and despairing year of life. Roth died in exile and anomy, in Paris in 1939, at the age of 44. Translator Michael Hoffman declares that the alcoholic and prematurely decrepit Roth worked on this story with unusual care and deliberation, polishing it painstakingly in a manner he'd seldom had time for during his journalistic career. It is indeed a diamantine piece of writing-craft. Though it has the surface simplicity of a hagiography, its depths are anything but naive. Some readers may find it reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy's late tales of sanctity, but Roth's concept of Holiness is far subtler, and thus more interesting than Tolstoy's.

The Drinker of the title is a 'clochard', a derelict who sleeps under the bridges of the Seine. One night, chance encounters begin to attend him, money comes his way, not any fortune but enough to get him fed and clothed and rested... and drunk more often and more utterly than his routine of poverty had allowed. In his damaged consciousness, the encounters are 'miraculous' and require him to confront his conscience, to redress his own worthlessness. In the end, he dies in a state of delirious sanctity, convinced that a little girl he encountered in a bar is Saint Therese. Whether the author, Roth, supposed that we the readers would unquestioningly accept the Drinker's epiphany as real ... ah well, the the elusive genius of this story. Did Roth himself die in a state of blissful religious certainty? Ah well, I rather think he hoped to die as well as his drunkard; whether he did or not, he concluded his writing career with a miracle.

[The same translation is available in another edition, together with Roth's "Left and Right" -- a better buy.]

the legend of a holy drinker
a small masterpiece that could not get its due recognition in the literary world.but this is a star created by a genius (a literary genius of rare and exceptional creative ability).so much of life so much of spirit so much ofthe realities of naked life these forty odd pages that are enoughtoexperience the life in its totality-its soft and beautiful oasis thateverybody runs behind.it is on this oasis that life is building up.no workis comparable with this one that emphasis the importance of the dream inlife.there is a lot to understand from these forty pages .magical realismis a real realism here.the foundations of individual life is surely madewith dreams.magic of dreams in life..only a genius of very very exceptionalcalibre can create an "andreas"(main charecter) who is so muchdown to earth and life and who goes thru a series of miracles.the book isabout 70 years old but the fragrance is still fresh and will be freshever.a real writer is a plesure to read and experience.rarely we can see aphilosophical novel written in so simple words.the mixing of reality anddream so that we are unable to differentiate what is what;but we know thisis life.our life.my life.if we are reading for the first time weregretfully close the book that we found the book,the writer ratherlate.powerful,touching and delightful little gem of a novel.....dream landanyway is a reality...more real than the real...the tale or legend ofandrea is not thrust upon the reader but left lingering in the mind...everyreader will not forget this book by a genius.everybody will get somthingfrom this book.. ... Read more