Widely praised and rarely available in English, “Weights and Measures” was one of Joseph Roth's final works while living in exile in France before his death. A fable about the disintegration of a good man, the novel transports us back in time to Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century.
In this haunting and poetic novel, scrupulous artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz is persuaded by his wife to leave behind his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army and take up a civilian post as Inspector of” Weights and Measures” in a secluded territory near the Russian border. Once there, his discipline and quiet dignity begin to dissolve as he encounters a shadowy world of smugglers, fugitives, and runaways.
A deeply felt commentary on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, “Weights and Measures” registers on both a historical and personal level to portray the slow capitulation of a good man to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.
