Rebellion

Rebellion is the story of Great War veteran Andreas Pum, who loses a leg and gains a medal. He marries, plays a barrel organ and is happy. But hen he is imprisoned after a fight, life seems unbearably altered. A chance encounter with an old comrade who has made his fortune introduces Pum to a world where he has a transfiguring experience of justice.

Brilliantly observed and icily concise ... Rebellion makes one eager to take the translator's advice and read the rest of Roth's oeuvre

Sunday Times

Roth's writing, in this fine translation by the poet Michael Hoffmann, is unambiguous, direct, his story told with the simplicity of a fable, though suffused with period detail and a poignant awareness of morality's steady step

Scotland on Sunday

The Author

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler’s assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls, The Emperor’s Tomb and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

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The Translator

Michael Hofmann is a poet, translator and critic. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse. He recently translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos.

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