Report from a Parisian Paradise : Essays from France, 1925 1939

by Roth, Joseph

• ISBN13: 9780393051452
• ISBN10: 0393051455
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

The wisdom of a lost generation distilled in a bottle of Calvados. Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. Translated and collected together here for the first time in English, the exhilarating pieces in Report from a Parisian Paradise evoke, in a tone of lucid excitement, a world of suppleness, beauty, and promise. So prophetic, so trenchant, so ultimately haunting were Roth's perceptions of a world where "the girls became more lost than ever," that he resorted increasingly to drink to douse his vision of a conflagration that could not be averted. From the port town of Marseille to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon, from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, Roth's book is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work filled with a transcendent philosophical clarity. 40 illustrations.

Author Biography

Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the author of such classics as The Radetzky March and The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, died in Paris in June 1939 of causes related to alchoholism

Table of Contents

Introduction	11	(14)
Part I First Impressions
How to Celebrate a Revolution	25	(2)
America over Paris	27	(8)
Part II In the French Midi
Lyons	35	(3)
The Cinema in the Arena	38	(3)
Nothing Going On---In Vienne	41	(4)
Tournon	45	(4)
Bullfight on Sunday	49	(5)
Marseilles	54	(4)
The Boatman	58	(3)
Nice	61	(3)
A Cinema in the Harbor	64	(5)
Part III The White Cities
The White Cities	69	(8)
Lyons	77	(8)
Vienne	85	(6)
Tournon	91	(6)
Avignon	97	(13)
Les Baux	110	(6)
Nimes and Arles	116	(8)
Tarascon and Beaucaire	124	(6)
Marseilles Revisited	130	(7)
The People	137	(8)
Part IV The Wandering Jews
Paris	145	(10)
Part V Parisian Paradise
Count d'Orgel and The Devil in the Flesh	155	(2)
Letter from Paris	157	(2)
Report from a Parisian Paradise	159	(4)
Saint-Quentin, Peronne, Maisonnette	163	(6)
The Troubadour	169	(3)
La Renaissance Latine	172	(3)
Twenty Minutes from Before the War	175	(4)
Books About Soldiers	179	(4)
A Day or Two in Deauville	183	(6)
Emile Zola---Author Away from His Desk	189	(3)
The Living Buddha	192	(3)
The Panopticum on Sunday	195	(5)
The Child in Paris	200	(2)
Honor to the Roofs of Paris!	202	(4)
The Frenchman on Wotan's Oak	206	(8)
French People	214	(3)
Children Are Exchanged	217	(6)
Part VI In the Bistro After Midnight
God in Germany	223	(3)
Europe Is Possible Only Without the Third Reich	226	(4)
The Poet Paul Claudel	230	(3)
The Myth of the German Soul	233	(5)
Rest While Watching the Demolition	238	(4)
The Children of Exile	242	(4)
In the Bistro After Midnight	246	(5)
Old Cossacks	251	(2)
From the ``Black-and-Yellow Diary,'' March 12 and 13, 1939	253	(3)
Clemenceau	256	(20)
From an Author's Diary	276	(5)
Index	281