The Joseph Roth Collection

Book IV: Panoptikum, The Triumph of Beauty, Zipper and His Father

By: Joseph Roth

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Three works that reveal a Joseph Roth most readers have never fully encountered.

Panoptikum — assembled by Roth himself from his Frankfurter Zeitung feuilletons of the 1920s and published in 1930 — is the great journalist at work: sketching the night police reporter, the old waiter who has become invisible in his own café, the hotel porter whose entire philosophy is in the way he holds a door, the border crossing into Russia, Christmas in Cochinchina. Short pieces, each one exact. Together, a portrait of interwar Europe seen from the ground up.

The Triumph of Beauty — first published in Paris in 1934, during Roth's exile — is something rarer: Roth as satirist. Gwendoline is beautiful, English, entirely self-absorbed, and she has married a Viennese diplomat who is not equipped for what is about to happen to him. His friend, the spa physician Dr. Skowronnek, watches with the rueful expertise of a man who has made a specialty of the psychological ailments of married women. A comedy of manners, cool and precise and quietly merciless.

Zipper and His Father — published in 1928 — is Roth's most personal novel, narrated by a figure who names himself Joseph Roth at the end. Arnold Zipper is his oldest friend; Arnold's father, a violin-maker of grand ambitions and modest means, is the father the narrator never had. Through their friendship, across the years of the war and the broken decades that follow, Roth traces what happens to a generation that was promised everything and delivered nothing — rendered with the tenderness of someone who loved these people and saw them clearly.

By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.