(Iread this without reading the Radetsky March prior.)

I think I gained a newfound appreciation for this book in the final fifty pages. When Trotta returns from the war, Roth writes each scene exquisitely so that you can sense the immense displacement felt in Vienna at the time. You are able to get some sense of those who are ‘getting on’, those who are steuggling to adapt and those who have to change each and every day, sometimes for gain, sometimes for loss, to keep up with the times.

Roth seems to perfectly capture the intense tumult of the times as Austria-Hungary grappled with it’s changing role in the world through each of his characters. The heartbreaking moment the reader is told Trotta’s mother is going deaf seems to me one of the most perfectly written pieces of wistful nostalgia in all of literature and the most appropriate encapsulation of this era in European history I have come across.