Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is the quintessential book about the end of the Habsburg empire and the preface to the First World War. It evokes for me all of those romantic and melancholy things about the Balkans -- very evocative, by a gifted and tragic author who killed himself in Paris.
Your first book is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.
This is a book about the end of the Habsburg Empire and about a father and a son, and it was the favourite book of most journalists who worked in the Balkans. It has these themes of melancholy and the Balkans is a very melancholy place, especially in autumn. This book is very evocative of that. Roth came of age at the end of the Habsburg Empire and he killed himself on the Rue des Tournelles, just two streets away from where I live. He was an alcoholic. He was one of the great European novelists of the time but is very cultish – not as widely known as he should be. He writes very evocatively and hauntingly of a vanished world, about losing your youth, your friends, your family. It’s not cheerful, but the Balkans is not a cheerful place. The father and son relationship in the book is a very damaged one. The son is a failed soldier who lets his father down in every imaginable way. There is a scene where he’s talking to his father, a typically strong figure, and he can’t shake thoughts of death. He’s haunted by death and keeps saying something like; ‘The dead, the dead.’ So, it’s also about him longing for the love of his father. It’s about longing.
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Janine di Giovanni is one of Europe's most respected and experienced war reporters. Born in the US, she began reporting by covering the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s and went on to report nearly every violent conflict since then. Her trademark has always been to write about the human cost of war, to attempt to give war a human face, and to work in conflict zones that the world's press has forgotten.
