Weights and Measures

Description

A short, brilliantly evocative novel set in the bleak eastern European borderlands before the First World War An artillery officer is persuaded by his resentful wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army to take up a civilian post as inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. At first attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is soon at a loss in a shadowy world of smugglers, profiteers and petty crooks. This great, painful novel is both a brilliant evocation of the remote reaches of eastern Europe before the catastrophe of the world wars and a frightening picture of the slow capitulation of a good man with traditional standards to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.

This small novel is a masterpiece -- Angela Huth * Listener * Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading pleasure... A haunting little book, touched by genius * Guardian * A masterly performance -- Paul Bailey * Evening Standard * An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose... I want to read more * New Statesman * Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol... passages of electrifying beauty * The Times *