Right and Left and the Legend of the Holy Drinker

Overlook, dist. by Viking. May 1992. 303p. tr. by Michael Hofmann. LC 91-35797. ISBN 0-87951-448-5. $23.95. F The tenth in Overlook's series of works by the late Austrian writer (who died just prior to World War II), this volume pairs the novel-length, digressive Right and Left with the short, sweet Legend of the Holy Drinker. In the first, a bitter comedy of manners, the sons of a nouveau riche banker put on the airs of middle-class affectation and political rebellion. Paul, who has an enormous talent for being a chameleon, switches from artiste to soldier to recluse to social butterfly, while Theodor, despite his mother's Jewish heritage, dons the brown shirt of the Nazi Party. In Holy Drinker, a seriocomic parable, a dissolute, drunken ex-convict is given 200 francs, which he vows to repay to a shrine of St. Therese. Despite the best of intentions, he becomes sidetracked by bizarre events, his own weakness, an ex-girlfriend, and further windfalls. He finally repays his debt in a revelatory, bittersweet gesture of profound absurdity. A finely wrought look at Europe between the wars by an underrated writer. Recommended.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A master of modern fiction who fled Nazi Germany and died in France in 1939, Roth is in top form in these two works. First published in 1929, Right and Left , set in 1920s Berlin, is a remarkably prescient novella prefiguring the collapse of morality and the rise of Nazism. It concerns the explosive sibling rivalry between Paul Bernheim, a cultured, snobbish banker who marries for money, and his brother Theodore, a violent brownshirt posing as a pure Aryan, hiding his mother's Jewish ancestry. By means of a cagey, enigmatic Russian financier who manipulates the two brothers, Roth punctures the smug pretensions and illusions of Germany's precarious middle class. Himself a chronic alcoholic, the author transforms his personal tragedy into a light, sparkling modern fable in The Legend of the Holy Drinker , finished just before his death. Set in Paris, it follows a drunken vagrant who's continually sidetracked in his efforts to make good on his promise to deliver a sum of money to the shrine of St. Theresa. Hofmann's inspired translation showcases Roth's galvanizing, constantly surprising style.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The situation is hopeless but not serious, they used to say in Vienna. The great post-WW I Austrian moralists, Kraus, Musil, Roth, couched the gloomiest judgments in light, entertaining forms. The English-speaking world is just catching up with these modern masters. This, the tenth in Overlook's Roth series, makes a good introduction to his incomparable work. With Stendhalian clarity and brio, with a Balzacian, not to say Marxian, grasp of society's inner workings, in writing that is precise in image and profound but never ponderous, Roth graphed the aftershocks of empires' collapse and the addled lives of sons who lack their fathers' vitality and their hold on simple truths. Right and Left is more malicious than Roth's loving Trotta family saga (The Radetzky March, The Emperor's Tomb) because he's writing about ascendant Germany. With great acuity, he charts the slow metamorphosis of a 1920's Berlin dandy, an Anglophile, into a chemical industry magnate, and the transformation of his proto-Nazi brother into a trendy left-wing journalist. In the post-WW I generation of hollow men, ``right'' and ``left'' are interchangeable, and a taste for culture leads right to the manufacture of poison gas. Pulling the plot-strings here is a fascinating character patterned on Balzac's Vautrin. Nikolai Brandeis has shed his illusions, his vanity, and has only a kind of philanthropic contempt for others. He builds a financial empire and then walks away from it in disgust. His mysterious disappearance on the book's last page suggests that in the age of mass media, the pursuit of truth requires silence, exile, and cunning. The companion piece, Legend of the Holy Drinker, shows a series of small miracles restoring the dignity of a homeless drunk; it breathes a democratic compassion and delicate tact utterly lacking among us. The second of these was Roth's last work, his graceful exit, in 1939, from a world that didn't deserve him. The very British translation is loyal to his light, ironic touch. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.