Report from a Parisian Paradise

Essays from France, 1925-1939

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by Joseph Roth,

Translated by Michael Hofmann

W. W. Norton and Co.

Due/Published August 2005, 304 pages, paper

ISBN 0393327167

Joseph Roth (1894-1939), perhaps the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. Translated and collected together here for the first time in English, the pieces in Report from a Parisian Paradise evoke a world of beauty and promise. So ultimately haunting were Roth's perceptions of a world where "the girls became more lost than ever," that he resorted increasingly to drink to douse his vision of a conflagration that could not be averted. From the port town of Marseille to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the hill country around Avignon, from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, Roth's book is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a revelatory work of philosophical clarity. 40 illustrations.