The Hundred Days

by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk (Translator)

Overview

Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica—an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates.

Roth’s signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. “There may be,” as James Wood has stated, “no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225113
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/11/2016
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published several books and articles before his untimely death at the age of 44. Roth’s writing has been admired by J. M. Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elie Wiesel, and Nadine Gordimer, among many others.

Richard Panchyk has published twenty-three books, including translations of three Joseph Roth novels: The Antichrist, The Hundred Days, and Perlefter.

Editorial Reviews

"There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth."

Joseph Brodsky

"A novel of great sensitivity and resonance. The Hundred Days is a meditation on the nature of greatness and love’s dogged loyalty, interwoven with the well-balanced irony that is Roth’s trademark. It’s a sad little gem."

Boston Review

"An achingly beautiful fictional account of the rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon."

Words Without Borders - Abby Margulies

"The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction."

Nadine Gordimer

"This is not perhaps the real Napoleon, but it's certainly a remarkable creation that leaps off the page."

The Telegraph - Jake Kerridge

"What a marvelous writer! Read him now, you can thank me later."

Michael Dirda

"[Roth's] Napoleon is a vivid depiction of waning greatness." — The Boston Review

From the Publisher

2014-07-02
Sympathy for characters vies withpurplish prose and blaring symbols in this reimagining of Napoleon's briefresurgence after his first exile.Roth (Joseph Roth: A Life inLetters, 2012, etc.) focuses on the period (actually 111 days) betweenNapoleon's triumphant return to Paris from banishment on Elba and his defeat atWaterloo, imagining a great man moving toward his downfall. In this slimhistorical novel, the author dwells on the Corsican's solitude, ambitions andshifting emotions in two sections, while two others concern a palace laundressnamed Angelina, also Corsican, who is infatuated with the emperor and whoseaunt tells fortunes for the great man. Napoleon has an encounter with thewasherwoman that leads to an almost-tryst, as well as two brushes with her son,a drummer boy in the army. The second of these, on his final battlefield, is,like many of the book's stronger scenes, damp with bathos. Angelina brieflyinterrupts her adoration of the man, "so great that everything in the world washis," to dally with the "world of sabres, spurs, boots and woven braid" in theperson of "the magnificent Sergeant-Major Sosthene," a comic giant and thedrummer boy's dad. She will also find refuge during the Elba days in the bed ofa kind Polish cobbler with a wooden leg. Aside from reviewing his troops,studying his maps and visiting his mom, Napoleon does little until his coachride to Belgium and flight to the Atlantic and his last jailers, the British.Roth dwells at length on his solitude and his consciousness of time runningshort. Ticking clocks and trickling sand in "an hourglass of polished beryl"are less than subtle reminders of "his enemy, Time."Where the classic Radetsky Marchcould woo any reader with its breadth, insight and humor, this novel offers asentimental miniaturist painting soppy little scenes that maybe only a Rothcompletist will appreciate.

Kirkus Reviews