The valet is Dutch. The manager is Levantine; and for years I’ve suspected the cook of being Czech”), or sometimes just a motiveless and fantastic gyre:

The “Hotel Kopriva” is always between trains. Its eighty rooms and hundred and twenty beds whirl round and round. The “Hotel Kopriva” doesn’t exist. It merely seems to exist. The gramophone tumbles upstairs and down. The sample cases fly through the air. The manager rushes from room to room. The room-service waiter runs to the train. The porter is knocked for six. The manager is the room-service waiter. The porter is the manager. The room-service waiter is the porter. The room numbers are departure times. The clock is a timetable. The visitors are tied to the station on invisible elastics. They bounce back and forth. The gramophone sings train sounds. Eighty makes a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty rooms trundle through eighty beds.

Roth may indeed have sketched the portrait of his age, but these pieces also make a portrait of their author: wilful and versatile, aggressive and benign, beautiful and drawn to ugliness, everywhere and nowhere (Tirana and Baku and the railway junction at 4 a.m.), philanthropical and misanthropical, endlessly spooked and endlessly observant. Surely among other more-or-less intended self-portraits (the grave Grillparzer the obvious example) he is also Grock, the musical clown, the multi-instrumentalist in a world of “exemplary mediocrity”, who plays everything, even his balled-up gloves, and is finally incapable by himself of finding his way offstage:

a sad face full of noble ugliness, an aristocrat in a crude world, a man of noble truth betrayed a thousand times, an honest, yes, a humble striver who always comes a cropper, a man born for despair who forces himself to believe, a clumsy so-and-so, a hero, a lofty man in the depths, defeated a thousand times but always victorious.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

FEBRUARY 2015

 

Envoi

 

1. A Man Reads the Paper

The expression on the face of the newspaper reader is serious, sometimes tending to grim, occasionally dissolving in smiling hilarity. While his slightly bulbous pupils in their sharp oval spectacles slalom down the page, dreamy fingers play on the café table and perform a silent trill that looks like a form of grief—as though the fingertips were feeling for invisible crumbs to pick up.

The newspaper reader has a long, well-trimmed shovel beard that covers the feuilleton page while he attends to the political news. Half-obscured by the beard, in sumptuous purple splendour, shimmers a bow tie whose knot I am unable to see, except when the newspaper reader thoughtfully strokes his Adam’s apple.

I can see what is engaging the newspaper reader’s attention: the recent sensational reports from Budapest. They have been given a bold headline. They are presented in a fluffy, tempting, positively beguiling layout, in numerous little paragraphs, each one of which has its own alluring subtitle. Like all news, they give themselves away before they can be transmitted: and they give away more than they can possibly keep.

It is impossible to see them as anything but sensationalist. They are about the passing of false bills, but they don’t tell the whole story. They are scrupulously accurate and yet still they withhold a few details. They describe the character of the counterfeiter, but they don’t know his name.