Summarized, Joseph Roth’s Flight Without End, sounds action-packed: Austrian lieutenant Franz Tunda escapes from Siberian prison and sets out to find his fiancée, Irene, only to accidentally join the Red Army (and fall in love with fellow revolutionary Natasha). Then on to Moscow, Baku, Vienna, Berlin, Paris…And yet, the experience of reading Roth’s slender novel feels languorous — interwar Europe appearing as a dream, or perhaps as a decorous nightmare. As Tunda drifts west, Roth also intimates a sort of ghost story — but who are the ghosts? Inhabitants of a German university town whose Sunday strolling is (in an exquisite chapter to which I cannot do justice) rendered as a spectral choreography (“It was as if the town were quite uninhabited, as if — on Sundays only — the dead came on leave from the cemeteries”)? Or Tunda himself, emblematic of those “who came back but never again came home,” wandering the world as a phantom-like stranger.

In addition to making the familiar strange, Roth excels as a raconteur (the story of a Polish farmer in Siberia is a paragraph-length narrative masterpiece), and in deliciously blending irony and romanticism (e.g., of Irene, “He loved her twice over: as an ideal, and as one lost forever”).