Flight Without End

I am slowly catching up with the genius of Joseph Roth. After the multigenerational sweep of his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, this little novel reads like a minor chamber piece, but in some ways it burrowed under my skin more deeply. It's the story, such as it is, of a certain Franz Tunda—a bourgeois young Austrian officer, engaged to a suitable bride, whose life goes thoroughly sideways when he is taken as a prisoner of war and escapes to a new identity in Siberia. Possessed by a strangely indifferent restlessness, he finds himself a Soviet revolutionary, then a husband in Baku, and finally a sponger and a vagrant in Vienna and Paris: a perfectly modern man, and an utterly "superfluous" one. It's an oddly unsettling, and often drily hilarious, story.