Flight Without End [Paperback]

In my approach to this amazing writer Joseph Roth, I found the following sentence by the doyen of literary critics in Germany, a man called Reich-Ranicki (a survivor from the Polish ghettos, now 90 years old). He is quoted on the back of the German pocket book edition of Flight without End as saying that Roth put the protagonists of his tales under a light as clear as glass. I keep thinking about that and it strikes me as a good approximation. Roth's people are not described with many words, but with an uncanny precision, and mostly through their words and actions.

Flucht ohne Ende is in a way unusual for Roth. Not so much the story: the life of a former Austrian officer in WW1, who gets captured by the Russians, is a POW in Siberia, escapes and hides with a Polish drifter in Siberia, assumes a Polish identity, tries to walk home after the war is over, gets caught by the Whites, freed by the Reds, falls in love, becomes a revolutionary, moves on, to the Caucasus, then back to Austria, then to stay with his wealthy brother in the Rhineland, then to look for his former bride in Berlin, then to Paris... The story of a de-rooted man in the turbulences of post-war Europe. Nobody in the whole world is as superfluous as he.

While the plot looks like a typical Roth, including reminiscences of Radetzky March, the writing is a bit different. It starts with a 7 line foreword, dated 1927, and signed Joseph Roth, where he claims that the following is pure fact, the life of his friend Franz, based partly on what Franz has told him and partly on writing from Franz himself. (This is a trick frequently used, e.g. by Nabokov, but untypical for Roth.)

The alleged diary pages have a different tone from the rest of the text: they describe banalities and occurrences with a naïve distance that reminded me of Robert Walser's writing. I never before thought of Walser at all when reading Roth. Franz also writes a letter to Roth, after his return to Austria, and before the two have met again. The letter is among the weaker texts in this messy book. An attempt at explaining what had not been asked: why had he left the Soviet Union?

The `direct' narration pieces (i.e. where Roth claims to paraphrase his friend) are also not entirely like other Roths: this is a most aphoristic novel. We get short statements about everything under the sun: the world, war, revolution, patriotism, society, love, man, woman, writing, Berlin, Paris ... Roth and his creature Franz have a brief, dry comment about them all.
The visit to the family of his socially successful and saturated brother is a brilliant satire on German provincial complacency. It reminded me of some reasons why I don't live there any more.

One must have a goal in life, no? Franz is wondering if he has not let himself be determined too much by the accidental events in his life, rather than define what he really wanted. A goal is surely better than an ideal, is fictional Roth's answer to Franz's doubts.
Is Franz meant to be an alter ego? One would think so. This is maybe not Roth's best novel, but possibly his most personal one (taking into account that I have read only about half of his published books.) The man may have thrown a clear light on his creatures, but he was not the most open one about himself.

Austrian Lt. Franz Tunda, the main character of Roth's "Flight Without End," escapes from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp during World War I. He hides out in Siberia until the war ends, then attempts to return to his former life in Vienna. On the way, Tunda becomes enmeshed in the turbulence of post-war Europe, a world that seems to have utterly lost its bearings.

Although it would be a stretch to characterize his decade-long effort to get home as a full-fledged Odyssey, the kaleidoscopic variety of his travels and exploits do lend the book some of the marvelously dramatic qualities of the epic genre. Tunda is a brutal footsoldier drafted to fight for the Bolshevik revolution; a mild-mannered Soviet functionary in faraway Baku; a free spirit smothered by the bourgeois conformity of Roth's unnamed but familiar "city on the Rhine"; a love-besotted flaneur on the boulevards of Paris.

Much of Roth's work grapples with the demise of the 19th century's certainties in the aftermath of World War I. In this "Flight without End," the possibilities of life are, both for better and for worse, greatly expanded.

.... You can't catch me! I'm the gingerbread man!"

Franz Tunda, the principal figure in "Flucht ohne Ende", is a sort of gingerbread man, kneaded into shape more by events than by his own will. He's a skilled escapist, yet he's captured - literally - in the first sentence of the novella; a lieutenant in the Austrian army of WW1, he becomes a prisoner in pre-revolutionary Russia. He escapes from the prison camp - immediately, in the third sentence! - and finds asylum with a hermit woodcutter/huntsman in Siberia. Assuming his protector's family name, he runs again, having learned months after the fact that the war is over. But he's caught again, first by Whites and then by Reds, well short of home in Austria. This time he's captured emotionally as well, falling in love with his captor, the Revolutionary Woman. Kneaded into plausible Communist cookie-shape by his Pasionaria, he spends the next several years slipping away from various configurations of his identity in the New Utopia of Communism, and then runs full speed frantically out of Russia toward ....

Toward what is always the question. Does the Gingerbread Boy ever have an idea of where his flight will take him? And what if he does escape? Where will he be then?

Franz Tunda escapes to Western Europe - Germany and France - and to "modernity". In both, he is utterly superfluous. The resourceful escape artist has no resources for staying put. Without work, without money, without any useful identity except his knack for expanding upon his adventures in Siberia, he is the prototypical random particle in the cloud chamber of modern times. The book will end with him standing at a corner in Paris, with no sense of what direction to flee toward next. And that's where author Joseph Roth finds him.

"Flight Without End" breaks (somewhat awkwardly) into two sections, composed in two disparate stylistic languages. The first half, narrating Tunda's life from his capture by the Russians to his homecoming to Austria, is written in Roth's most precise, short-sentence simplicity, as 'clean' of ornamentation as prose can be. Once Tunda reaches the West and Modernity, the tone and the syntax change radically. The author introduces himself in the story. There are purported quotes from Tunda's own journal and letters. The sentences become longer, much longer, and Tunda is turned inside out. From a man of action - flight! - he becomes a man of passive observation, and what he observes perplexes him into helplessness. His observations (presumably reflecting Roth's) become bitterly satirical. Everything he has fled toward seems superficial, artificial, empty. He is superfluous, as he knows, because everything is superfluous in such a world, where filling one's accepted role is the only goal. Roth's humor is killingly funny, here and in other books, but the issue is often whom to kill.

Roth discovers his character Tunda more than once. It seems to be implied that they were pre-war friends. Then, after he reaches the West, Tunda seeks Roth's help by letter and Roth reconnects Tunda to his brother in Germany. Finally, as mentioned above, Roth 'meets' Tunda on the street - by chance? - in Paris. Here's the text of Roth's Foreword from the 1927 Paris edition of Flucht ohne Ende:

""In what follows I tell the story of my friend, comrade and spiritual associate, Franz Tunda. I follow in part his notes, in part his narrative. I have invented nothing, made up nothing. The question of poetic invention is no longer relevant, Observed fact is all that counts.""

How seriously can we take that declaration? Roth is presenting us with the apparatus of a factual account, not a fiction, but I as a reader can't help suspecting a trick. Was "Franz Tunda" in a normal sense a real person? Much of his reported life seems parallel to Roth's, including especially his stateless arrival in Paris. There's no consistent distinction, in the book, between the voices of the author and the protagonist; it's impossible to distinguish between Tunda's sardonic satires of German/French society and Roth's own. Perhaps some Roth scholar, reading this review, will know whether or not the tale of Franz Tunda is straightforward non-fiction or disingenuous dissimilation. Until I learn otherwise, I'm presuming the latter, with the implication that Franz Tunda is a self-portrait, that it was Joseph Roth who encountered himself standing superfluously on that corner in Paris.

A proper literary critic would no doubt judge this book to be awkward in construction, perhaps hastily written, unsatisfactory in terms of the Aristotelian unities. Yeah, that's about right. It's not as well crafted as Roth's best novellas --"Job" or "The Rebellion" for instance -- but it's devastating in its way, as a portrayal of the state of society in Europe in the 1920s, and as a confession of the hopelessness of the individual in the Mass Culture of the modern world.