FLIGHT WITHOUT END

A shlemiel blunders through life and love in this poignant short novel.

“No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.” Like Roth (1894-1939), Franz Tunda served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. As the story opens, we find Tunda in Siberia, having escaped from a POW camp and found shelter in the taiga with an eccentric Pole named Baranowicz. No problem: “He spoke Polish.…It was easy for him to pass himself off as a younger brother of the Pole.” As the story unfolds, Roth reveals that Tunda carries as an amulet a photograph of his fiancée, who turns out to be less infatuated with him than he is with her “as an ideal, and as one lost forever.” It’s a pattern that Roth, who releases details about Tunda here and there (his mother is Jewish, he has a brother who conducts an orchestra in Germany), has good fun with: Apolitical at first, Tunda is caught up in the Russian Civil War as he tries to make his way homeward, falling in love with a fellow Bolshevik who finds him hopelessly bourgeois. Sent to the Caucasus to spread revolution, he marries a silent woman whose “reserve damped the noise of the world and slowed the passage of the hours”; unceremoniously abandoning her, he returns to Europe to meet his estranged brother—estranged over a woman, of course—and chase after his erstwhile fiancée. Roth brings himself into the story halfway through, wryly using Tunda as a vehicle for his own self-confessed sense of rootlessness. At the end of this far-flung yarn, Tunda, we learn, “had no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, and not even any self-love,” and we sense that the coming years will bring only further disappointment—and eventually doom.

A slyly satirical story of bewildered wandering, and a welcome addition to Roth’s work in English.