Weights and Measures (Penguin Modern Classics)

New
Paperback
2017
$10.60

'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one' At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschutz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man. Translated by David Le Vay

Synopsis

'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one' At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschutz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man. Translated by David Le Vay

$10.60

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 05 Oct 2017
ISBN 10: 0241307449
ISBN 13: 9780241307441
Book Overview: A short, brilliantly evocative novel set in the bleak eastern European borderlands before the First World War.

Media Reviews

This small novel is a masterpiece -- Angela Huth * Listener *
Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading pleasure... A haunting little book, touched by genius * Guardian *
A masterly performance -- Paul Bailey * Evening Standard *
An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose... I want to read more * New Statesman *
Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol... passages of electrifying beauty * The Times *

Author Bio

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.