A book about a man who has been socialized to die for the Kaiser, then finds that death means his mistress and friends rotting in the ground…before the Great War makes death so ubiquitous as to become “a matter of indifference”. Also a book about a man who is tired of doing his job. Radetzky March feels like a classic, and it was sometimes fascinating to read Joseph Roth’s sprawling portrayal of a time when duels and sincere devotion to Franz Joseph coexisted with the telephone, electric lights, stirrings of nationalism and creeping malaise. Yet I missed the texture of the other, perhaps more minor Roth works I’ve read so far — the disjointed dreamscape of Flight Without End, the stories rhapsodizing coral or violet ink — which left me with a stranger, more delightful and more haunting impression of his lost world.