Few Notes on The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth's novel has been praised by more than one nobel laureate so there is really no point in me adding my own enthusiastic recommendation (two thumbs way way up, btw). J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have both called it a "masterpiece" while Joseph Brodskey, the Russian-American poet, said that "there is a poem on every page of the book." I will just add that though it is written by a comparatively obscure central european author, it is actually quite easy to read. (Just in case if you were wary of picking it up after seeing his name clubbed together with Musil, Mann or Kafka.)

I won't attempt to write a summary. Just a few thoughts after reading this otherwise very nicely written overview in The New Yorker of Roth's life and in particular this book. Joan Acocella in her essay says:

"Roth’s politics were not well worked out, and that fact underlies the one serious flaw of “The Radetzky March.” Lacking an explanation for the empire’s fall, Roth comes up with a notion of “fate,” and he bangs that drum portentously and repeatedly. I am almost glad the book has a fault. Roth extracted “The Radetzky March” from his very innards. This rather desperate, corny fate business reminds us of that fact, and counterbalances the crushing beauty of the rest of the book."

I think it was deliberate on Roth's part to keep the politics out of the narrative and quite in line with what he was trying to say in thematic terms. The novel, I felt, is a profoundly melancholic work, melancholic, in the Benjamin-ian or Sebald-ian (of Rings of Saturn) sense. It is not at all an objective account of a slice of life at a particular time or place or a fictional investigation into the historical causes of the demise of an empire. Otherwise, it could have easily become one of those tedious and pointless "historical epics". It is not an objective, realistic narrative at all. Everything is filtered through Roth's melancholic consciousness, so that he sees death everywhere from the very beginning. Whether it was the assassination of Archduke which precipitated the fall of the empire or something else, it doesn't matter. The point is, the empire and the social order was doomed like all empires and all social orders are. If it was not in 1914, it would have been a few years later. Same is true of individual lives too. Whether a life ends because of a particular disease or accident or it is because of the so-called natural causes (Bernhard style!) it doesn't matter. Life has to end, the cause is secondary and is assigned only in retrospect. The central truth is that everything has to end. Death is THE central fact of nature!

Also in this sense I think The Radetzky March resembles "the novel of ideas" more than the realistic Flaubert-Stendhal school of novel. (I also read somewhere that it is considered one of the best nineteenth century novels written in the twentieth century.) Indeed, if one reads it from a realistic novel perspective one will definitely get irritated with the repetitive metaphors, too many forced coincidences and a plot which is a little too tight for a "literary" novel. The dustjacket claims that Roth is "alongwith Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, among the greatest of the early twentieth century Central European writers." I think it fits better with a novel like The Magic Mountain than something like The Charterhouse of Parma. Roth may not be as sophisticated as Mann, but he shares many of Mann's preoccupations (e.g. the end of European civilization is one of the main themes of Magic Mountain too) and in the end, Radetzky March is far more moving, entertaining and gripping than Mann's novel.

I have copied some quotes from the book which will illustrate what I was trying to say. Also note that in most of the places death is spelled with a capital 'D'. My favourite is the fourth one.

"In those days there were a lot of men like Kapturak on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to circle around the old empire like those black cowardly birds that ogle a dying man from infinitely far away. Dark and impatient, beating their wings, they wait for his end. Their slating beaks jab into their prey. No one knows where they come from or where they fly off to. They are the feathered brethren of enigmatic Death; they are his harbingers, his escorts, and his successors."

"He walked very slowly as if following a hearse."

"He calmly fell asleep, believing the worst was over. He did not know--old Herr Trotta--that fate was brewing bitter grief for him while he slept. He was old and tired, and death was already lurking, but life would not yet let him go. Like a cruel host it held him fast at the table becase he had not yet tasted all the bitterness that had been prepared for him."

"Trotta drank. The bare room grew homier. The naked electric bulb on its twisted wire, circled by whirring moths and swaying in the nocturnal wind, aroused fleeting cozy reflections on the brownish glass of the table. Gradually Trotta's disappointment mellowed into a pleasurable pain. He formed a kind of alliance with his grief. Everything in the world was extremely sorrowful today, and he, the lieutenant, was the midpoint of this miserable world. It was for him that the frogs were croaking so dolefully; the rueful crickets were lamenting for him. It was for him that the spring night was imbued with such a sweet, gentle sorrow, that the stars were so unreachably high in the heavens; for him alone their light twinkled with unrequited yearning. The infinite sorrow of the world fitted in perfectly with Trotta's misery. He suffered in utter harmony with the suffering universe. For behind the deep-blue vault of the sky, God himself gazed down at him in pity."

"Indeed, the appearance and the words of this strange district captain made them shudder. Perhaps they already felt the breath of Death, who was to grab them all a few months later--grab them by the throat! And they felt Death was breathing icily down their necks."