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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75575 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Readers of Joseph Roth's entre-les-guerres masterpiece The Radetzky March might reasonably take him for a peculiar kind of royalist. Again and again the author declares his nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had gone down in flames in 1918, even as he lampoons the regime's stodginess and casual cruelty. In his youth, however, he was an ardent man of the left, who earned the nickname der rote Roth: Red Roth. And his third novel, Rebellion, is perhaps the closest thing he ever wrote to an engagé work of fiction.

Chronicling the trials (literal and figurative) of a downtrodden prole, Roth seems sincerely indignant--and he even allows his protagonist a fiery speech in the final pages, during which the Almighty Himself gets an effective spanking: "How impotent You are in your omnipotence! You have billions of accounts and make mistakes in individual items? What kind of God are you?"

Prior to this point, Andreas Pum hasn't exactly been a model of biblical eloquence. After losing a leg in World War I, he's made his living as a beggar with a hurdy-gurdy, soliciting coins from passers-by. This pious lamebrain does have the luck to marry a voluptuous widow and for a brief moment he partakes of "a new and numbing blissfulness, which armours us against the offences and hurts of the world." But a quarrel with a middle-class snob on a tram soon deprives Andreas of his wife, his beggar's license and his freedom.

Thus begins his descent, which Roth narrates in such a rapid-fire style that this Viennese Job seems to hit bottom almost overnight. Perhaps Andreas's final jeremiad--and indeed, his transformation into a quasi-anarchist--betrays the hand of an ideological stage manager. Yet Roth was far too brilliant a novelist to dabble in social realism and even his portrait of Andreas's sentencing judge is deliciously equivocating:

The judge himself was clean-shaven. He had an impassive face of granite majesty, like a dead emperor's. It was gray as weathered sandstone ... It was a face that might have looked heartless and implacable, had the middle of its powerful masculine chin not held an appealing, almost child-like dimple.

For this die-hard fan of the Dual Monarchy, of course, the comparison to a dead emperor was the highest of compliments. But it was the novelist in Roth, not the left-leaning polemicist, who decided to add the dimple. --James Marcus

Synopsis
The story of Great War veteran, Andreas Pum. When he is imprisoned after a fight, life seems unbearable. A chance encounter with an old comrade who has made his fortune brings Pum to a world where he has a transfiguring experience of justice.

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Customer Reviews

Roth in his red period
What happens when one's faith in the modern istitutions of state and law fail? This is the political premise of Roth's early novel. In this short work we follow the decline of Andreas Pum, a holy fool of the modern age. Andreas a war veteran (having lost a leg) is given a beggars permit and set out into the streets to fend for himself. With a misplaced sense of nobility and absolute belief in the support of his country, he goes about this task with his head held high. At first things go well, but a chance encounter on a tram one day sets in motion a chain of events that ruin his life. It is not the material hurt or suffering that bite hardest, but the destruction of Pum's wold view. No longer can the state manifests itself as a just and moral arbitrator for him. Roth cleverly mirrors the loss of religious certainty with that of Pum's secular fall. The final passages of the book are beautiful and moving as they focus in on Pum's tragic response to the state's violent irrationality.