For several months, I put off reading the emperor’s tomb for the counterintuitive reason that its opening sentences — wry and melancholic — were too good, in fact sublimely good. But I’m glad I cut short the pleasures of anticipation and picked it up when I did because I think Joseph Roth’s works are really fascinating to read in succession, offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the Austro Hungarian empire. Kaleidoscopic here is probably more precise a description than it often is, as Roth’s dual monarchy (could it have been saved by becoming triple, as one of several trottas contends?) is populated by figures and places and narratives that recur/double/multiply, while feeling always different. If you’ve read a bit of Roth, this is often quite overt, and it’s fun to trace (e.g.) how Franz Ferdinand Trotta, frivolous yet haunted, intersects with and diverges from his morose noble relation (Carl Joseph Von Trotta of Radetzky March) — even appearing in the same battle where the other died — then retraces the journey of Franz Tunda from Flight without end (but having left his bride’s photograph behind). Roth’s obsession with doubling and difference ultimately seems to have something to do with loss and time and art. For instance, Vienna’s cafes pre and post war which have the same furniture, waiters etc while being in no way same.  But it is most poignant in Roth’s affectionate and elegiac portrayal of zlotogrod, the forsaken hinterland of Radetzky March, which represents the disturbing (if alluring) breakdown of imperial order in weights and measures. In the emperor’s tomb, however, zlotogrod is the soul of the empire — diverse yet magically (and precariously) united by wandering chestnut sellers and the Hapsburgs. It is suspended in words between the facing mirrors of romantic anticipation and memory, loss and fiction.