Empire of Signs

James Wood

  • The String of Pearls by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann
    Granta, 224 pp, £12.99, May 1998, ISBN 1 86207 087 3

With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling sentences, which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature. Joseph Brodsky said that there is a poem on every page of Roth, and certainly, Roth’s almost nervous fondness for metaphor recalls the image-blessed, image-sick prose of another poet, Osip Mandelstam, sooner than any novelist.

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