Across the literary pages | 13 February 2012

Spring is around the corner, and new books are flying onto the shelves.

The work of those Austro-Hungarians who followed in the wake of Franz Kafka is back in fashion. Stefan Zweig’s fiction is available in a new edition, as are the letters of his contemporary, Joseph Roth. A critical reappraisal of Roth is gathering pace. Writing in the pages, Philip Hensher has declared Roth’s The Radetzky March to be ‘a masterpiece of controlled, worldly irony which maintains a studious detachment.’ William Boyd took (£) a slightly different line in the Sunday Times:

‘In Roth’s work you have the same calm resignation in the face of the world’s vulgarities and injustice; the same celebration of its fleeting epiphanies; the same refusal to ¬condemn fellow human beings for their failings, shortcomings and inability to see what will actually make them relatively happy. But Roth in his life, unlike Chekhov, seemed incapable of finding that level of remove, of distance, that would provide some serenity.