Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois

✍ Scribed by Roth, Joseph

• Book ID: 108441017
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 663 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780720614879

✦ Synopsis

Now available for the first time in English, this important addition to the Roth canon is rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation

A novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death, this book chronicles the life and times of Alexander Perlefter, the well-to-do Austrian urbanite with whom his relative, a small-town narrator, Naphthali Kroj, has come to live after becoming orphaned. The colorful cast of characters includes Perlefter's four children: foolish Alfred, with his predilection for sleeping with servant girls and widows and boasting of the venereal diseases he contracts; the hapless Karoline, whose interest in math and physics and employment at a scientific institute seem to repel serious suitors; the flamboyant Julie, a sweet, pale, and anemic girl who likes any man who is inclined toward marriage; and the beautiful and flighty Margarete, besotted with a professor of history....