Over recent years, the poet Michael Hofmann’s glittering translations of Joseph Roth have single-handedly given a vanished voice fresh resonance in the English-speaking world. Now Hofmann has surpassed himself with the jewel in Roth’s crown. The Radetzky March (Granta, £14.99) was composed under the scudding storm clouds of chaotic politics, money worries and ill health in the early 1930s Yet it emerged as a majestically assured and engaging novel. From the moment when the Slovene peasant Joseph Trotta saves the young Emperor Franz Joseph from a French sniper at Solferino to the simultaneous death of the bewhiskered Habsburg patriarch and the saviour’s son, senior civil servant Baron von Trotta (and, of course, of the snobby but basically sane old Europe they upheld), Roth miraculously fuses grandeur of scale with intimacy of tone. The doomed insouciance of the Austro-Hungarian bloc in its latter days has bred a fair amount of literary and artistic kitsch (a concept that place and time invented) Roth is far too sharp, too spry, for any of that nonsense His waltzes tend to end in comic pratfalls.
He does, though, indulge in some forgiveable nostalgia for the cranky and creaky decency of the Dual Monarchy, when “it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died”.Hofmann’s version restores a landmark work to a quite dazzling luminosity. I’m not even sure that I agree with the introduction that the shine of the novel’s surfaces and the sinew of its scenes mean that Roth has little time for “character” in depth. It is true that he transforms attributes into actions, with quick and daring strokes. Meanwhile, his command of atmosphere – from velvet-and-gaslight Vienna interiors to the sparkle and snap of Moravian woods in a winter’s dawn – makes the whole notion of “dramatising” a supposedly lifeless literary text a bit redundant. Read The Radetzky March and the season’s finest classic serial will unfold – unaided – in the matchless theatre of imagination.. Two years ago, Sean Thomas received a Bad Sex Award for a passage in which he compared a young woman’s body to a Sony Walkman.
Now he has written a novel in which “bad sex” of a more serious nature takes centre-stage. In a roman ?lef of the least romantic kind, this true-to-life courtroom drama revisits Old Bailey court number 18. There, in 1987, the author stood trial for the rape of his ex-girlfriend. He was eventually found not guilty, but not before spending time in jail. The Cheek Perforation Dance, by Sean Thomas (Flamingo, £10.99, 277pp)
Two years ago, Sean Thomas received a Bad Sex Award for a passage in which he compared a young woman’s body to a Sony Walkman. Their story progresses along the lines of any ill-matched London romance He does drugs, she doesn’t. She’s studying the Crusades, he’s living off her parents’ money.
