The Tale of the 1002nd Night

Joseph Roth's last full length novel is, as usual for him, a surprise. Published during the year of his death in exile in Paris, 1939, it contains no trace at all of its times. It is a `historical' story, going back to Vienna in the previous century. It starts like a light-handed comedy, but turns into a dark tale of decadence and ruin. Main protagonists are a brainless aristocratic playboy (an officer and a gentleman), who is utterly destroyed by his own stupidity, and his naïve romantic girlfriend from simple circumstances, who has an illegitimate son from him, drifts into the service industry, strikes it rich, temporarily, due to unlikely events (see the novel's title), then loses all and more, due to her own simplicity. Catalysts of bad fate are a smart `business woman' who causes the downfall of the girl, and a reporter in need of cash who finishes the fool. The novel is to some extent less `Rothian' than most of his other fiction. It has a touch of Maupassant. So maybe his Parisian exile did have an effect after all? One could say, it is more conventional than many of his shorter texts. The baron has a property at the end of the Austrian world, which is run by an administrator who robs the baron blind. There is a scene when the baron receives a letter from his manager, informing him about his imminent ruin. The baron is bored, which reminded me of Gogol's Dead Souls. In a similar situation, the landowner says to his manager: why do you have to give me the bad news? Tell me something happy, so that I forget the bad news! Compared to his last published piece of fiction, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which was written and set in Paris, this novel is a straightforward tale. I mean, if you can accept a Shah of Persia visiting Vienna and asking for the prettiest countess at the ball, as a gift from the Austrian Emperor... (Rather more civilized procedure than the Sheikh who buys himself 4 virgins in the Parisian meat market in the film Taken, which I just happened to watch.)

Roth's last novel before he drank himself to death in 1939 Paris is his farewell to Fin-de-siecle Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire/Kingdom/uh. Monarchy. Take your pick as what to call the late 1800s Dual Monarchy which was known as the K and K (Empire and Kingdom). Mostly this story follows the adult lives of lower class merchant girl and an aristocratic member of the Cavalry (a Baron, whose name, Tattinger, is a french champagne). But what we are really treated to is a view of how at a time of peace, in the latter half of the 19th century, the average person was no smarter or more engaged with the world than your lowly serf or peasant. People were only involved on the surface of what was happening in the world and were very happy for parties, pretty costumes (uniforms for the officers) and a life without problems. While the book was written in interwar Paris, Roth was mirroring what was happening in much of Europe, post-The Great War. Europe was trying it's best to go on as if the war never happened the same way that 1870s Vienna tried to ignore it's ignominious loss in 1866 to Prussia. The loss forced the creation of the Dual Monarchy, and the sharing of power by the Empire (reflected by Franz Josef) with the largest of it's multiple minorities. Vienna was spending it's time ignoring the loss of 'actual' Great Power status by 'dressing up the pig'. (No matter how much make-up, clothes and jewels you put on a pig, it's still a pig.) The sarcasm that Roth directs at the aristocracy, is both biting (and to most of us in this century, old hat) and funny. Baron Tattinger, who would have made a great blond, is the airhead of airheads. When he is forced to look at 'people' for the first time, he is amazed to find that his company sergeant (whom he has known for thirteen years) actually reads and has a history prior to joining the Cavalry. Wow! Right up there with Newton getting hit with an apple. The Baron has trouble fitting him into his world view of the three levels of people: interesting, so-so or boring. The book loses a lot of it's strength being read in the 21st century, where we have George Bush and Karl Rove, acting like royalty who can do no wrong and Rumsfeld running around yelling 'off with their heads'. But the sarcasm does hold up and comes through after all these years.

Chekhov once said--okay, I got this from one of those greeting cards you find sold in urban bookstores--"Any idiot can handle a crisis; it's this daily life that's wearing me out." But the main characters in this book can handle neither a crisis nor much of daily life. Brief synopsis: the Shah of Persia travels to Vienna where, at a ball, he spies the beautiful Countess W and desires an evening alone with her. As this won't do, of course, Baron Taittinger is pressed into service to procure a reasonable facsimile. This he does, in the form of Mizzi, a woman the baron has debauched and fathered a son by, and who has subsequently entered Frau Matzner's brothel. Following the expense of his passion, the Shah makes Mizzi a rich woman by presenting her with an enormous string of pearls. The Shah returns home, and misery soon descends upon the baron, the prostitute, and even the madam. It seems to me that Roth sets up a contrast between the main characters, who come from the fringes of life (high or low) and are absolutely unable to negotiate relationships in any normal way, and secondary characters, who appear on the fringes of the novel and try unsuccessfully to help the others through. This is why others have charged--accurately in a sense--that the characters are "wafer-thin" or "puppet-like" or like wax figures. Baron Taittinger, in particular, is a cypher who reminds one of the baron, the father, in the Radetzky March: he is unable to cope with anything that does not comport with his status as both a baron and a "Captain of the Horse"--and even those roles he occupies more or less by rote, following rules that he dimly learned at a young age. It is not hard to predict his demise even as one, oddly perhaps, hopes against it. (In this I disagree with the reviewer who says that the reader does not become involved with the characters.) Last point, if you haven't read Roth before, you have missed out on his excellent plots and brilliant writing, so simple and pithy. A few examples: the Shah, following his night with Mizzi and realizing that European women are not particularly different from Persian: "He felt like a boy who, after an hour, has broken his new toy." Mizzi had no understanding of men because "in a so-called house of ill repute...one learned as much about the real world as one might in a girl's boarding school." The baron's life "contained an incident he could never tell anyone about. It circulated like a foreign body in his bloodstream; every so often it came up to his heart and squeezed it and pricked it and drilled into it." I'm not doing the book justice, but enough--this is a highly entertaining and provocative novel. I can't bring myself to give it five stars, but let's call it 4.7.

The editorial reviewers have done more justice to this beautiful book than I can. It is everything they say it is: a bittersweet delight to read.

I enjoyed this book very much. Roth is a much under appreciated author today and his style of writing is as modern as anyone's. While the plot meanders along a trite line, the heart of all Roth's work is the Austro-Hungarian Empire and all it's failings in morals, people and politics. This, along with Roth's Radetzky March, and you will have all you'll ever need to know about that important era.