The Radetzky March

"Back then before the Great War, when the incidents reported on these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. If a life was snuffed out from the host of the living, another life did not instantly replace it and make people forget the deceased. Instead, a gap remained where he had been, and both the near and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they saw this gap. If a fire devoured a house in a row of houses in a street, the charred site remained empty for a long time. For the bricklayers worked slowly and the leisurely, and when the closest neighbours as well as casual passersby looked at the empty lot, they remembered the shape and the walls of the vanished house. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically."

The above passage sums up the theme of The Radetzky March quite well. The Great War, mentioned in the first sentence of the paragraph, is not just the first world war, but also a metaphor for death and the end itself, the death of the "old world", of order and of European civilization itself. It is beautifully written dark masterpiece. It is almost as if Roth were obsessed with death, death is mentioned on almost every second page of the novel, he sees death everywhere:

"The people in this area were the spawn of the swamps. For the swamps lay incredibly widespread across the entire face of the land, on both sides of the highway, with frogs, fever germs, and treacherous grass that could be a horrible lure into a horrible death for innocent wanderers unfamiliar with the terrain. Many died, and their final cries for help went unheard. But all the people who were born there knew the treachery of swamps and had something of that treachery themselves. In spring and summer, the air was thick with an intense and incessant croaking of frogs. An equally intense trilling of larks exulted under the skies. And a tireless dialogue took place between the sky and the swamp."

I am almost finished with the book. Will add more later when I am done...