Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22910 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was a superb writer whose compact yet lambent fiction deserves the highest praise (and a much wider readership). The Legend of the Holy Drinker, written and published in the year of his death, is a deeply affecting tale of Andreas, an alcoholic like Roth, who drinks himself to death in the rough houses of Paris.

Michael Hoffman's superb translation has rightly garnered much praise. Hoffman stresses that, although often esteemed for the simplicity of his style, Roth is no brutalist: it is the economy and the directness of his writing that is so moving and makes his work so special. Despite its melancholic subject matter The Legend is an uplifting novella.

Throughout the tale Andreas, previously an impoverished vagrant, is continuously visited by miraculous good fortune that illuminates the last days of his mendicant existence and lift him, and the reader, to a new understanding of his (our) dissolution. Roth was a peerless writer and Granta must be praised for bringing him back to our attention in such lovely volumes. --Mark Thwaite

Synopsis
This book, one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject-matter. The Legend of the Holy Drinker was tumed into a film by Enrico Olmi, starring Rutger Hauer.

Customer Reviews

God knows it's beautiful
In the whole, sordid history of western literature, there have lived only three people who have possessed the genius and discipline to write prose so intensely fragile that the whole story would collapse on the removal of a single word: Joseph Roth, Ernest Hemingway and myself.

a minimalist drunk
this really is a very good example of an accomplished author telling an allegorical tale with ruthless efficiency. others have made the point, but there are few words here that seem out of place. it does seem a remarkable coincidence that the subject matter so eerily reflects the end of the author's life and yet appears to have little else autobiographical in it, but perhaps that is the neatest twist to the tale.

the tale is a slightly peculiar one of hope and despair and it poses the question - 'do miracles happen?'. the main character believes that this is is what his 'good luck' amounts to. though a lowly bum he finds salvation through a kindly stranger and a series of 'fortunate circumstances'.

the style is superb and i am rather fond of the message, but i didn't think the character or the scenario were sufficiently developed for this to be truly engaging and while i dont think that would have been roth's intention i still found it a slight disappointment. someone mentioned 'the old man & the sea' and i suspect one could also look to marquez's 'chronicle of a death foretold' as somewhat fuller examples of a similarly well-executed style of novella.

A must
First time I read this book, it did impact me profoundly. Few years later I had the opportunity to see the film, not available on DVD yet. Mr Hauer's performance is memorable and the entire setting fantastic.

There is one thing I would like to say about the book and the film: It can actually change the way someone sees things and consequently have a major impact on your life

Fantastic film: an inner-fight between the "ideal me" and the "Ideal of me"