Weights and Measures

Joseph Roth's dark fable about one man who is torn between resolve and restlessness, set in Eastern Europe's borderlands

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'A haunting little book, touched by genius' Guardian

'An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose' New Statesman

'Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol' The Times

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In this haunting late novel from Joseph Roth, artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz is persuaded by his wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army and take up a government post as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote town near the Russian border.

Once there, his discipline and quiet dignity begin to dissolve as he encounters a shadowy world of midnight gambling and smugglers, of frozen bodies in the woods and secret allegiances. When he discovers his wife is pregnant by his clerk, he vows to carry out justice. But as right and wrong prove harder to measure than he once thought, Eibenschütz becomes drawn into a destructive affair with the inn keeper's mistress.

A deeply felt commentary on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weights and Measures portrays the slow capitulation of a good man to insidious small-time corruption.