REBELLION

Rebellion ($21.95; Nov.; 160 pp.; 0-312-20574-0). This last of the late (1894—1939) Austrian writer’s 15 novels (including the highly praised Flight Without End and The Radetzky March) to appear in English is an early (1924) work: the pungently satiric story of Andreas Pum, a severely handicapped WWI veteran whose thoroughly understandable rudeness to a pompous passerby ends up costing him his job as a street organ-grinder, his marriage, and his faith in Germany’s ostensibly compassionate political and moral order. Rebellion’s no masterpiece but, rather, a bitterly compact (if simplistic) adumbration of Roth’s later, infinitely more challenging and rewarding fiction.