Joseph Roth’s final novel is a haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a magically evocative paean to the passing of time and the loss of hope. The Emperor’s Tomb runs from 1913 to 1938, from the eve of one world war to the eve of the next, from disaster to disaster. It is also a love story for Vienna. Striped with beauty and written in short propulsive chapters — full of upheavels, reversals, and abrupt twists of plot — the novel powerfully sketches a time of change and loss. Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, The Emperor’s Tomb tells of one man’s foppish, sleepwalking, spoiled youth and his struggle to come to terms with financial ruin, the coarsening of the world around him, and the first stirrings of Nazi barbarism.
The totality of Joseph Roth’s work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction.
— Nadine Gordimer
Mr. Hofmann’s bold translation is the carefully wrought work of a poet in full sympathy with his subject and his subject matter, in all its rootlessness, melancholy, and iconic brevity.
— The Economist
His books possess an eerie clairvoyant feel, shattering in their simplicity, exalting in their moral philosophical weight.
— Los Angeles Times
A profound farewell gesture of love and sorrow, such heartbreaking sorrow.
— The Irish Times
The Emperor’s Tomb is laconic and mannerly; spare and drenched in a desperate intensity of feeling …. a strange, wonderful, drastic, and unconsoling book.
