Picador Classics S.
3 total works
'I have killed and yet I consider myself to be a good man.' So begins the tale of former Russian secret agent Golubchik, holding court after hours in a tiny Russian restaurant on Paris's left bank. As he recounts his tale to a rapt audience, they find themselves drawn into his futile quest to claim the noble name of his father, his destructive love affair with a beautiful model and his hatred for his half-brother, the rightful Prince. Confession of a Murderer spans rural Russia, cosmopolitan St Petersburg and pre-First World War Paris and alternately fascinates and horrifies the reader with its wild story of collaboration, deception and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution.
'"A pity," says Abel Glanz, "it was a good hotel."'
Gabriel Dan is a former soldier in the Austrian Army who returns from a Siberian prison camp some time after the First World War. He arrives in an unnamed eastern town at the gates of Europe and lodges in the huge Hotel Savoy. The owner is absent, and the guests are odd, deranged, longing for salvation, dreaming of a release from the unbearable tensions of their lives. A former citizen who has made his fortune in the USA is rumoured to be on his way home - and murder and chaos ensue.
Written in 1923, Hotel Savoy is a dark, witty parable of Europe in the shadow of fascism and war: this is Roth at his best.
Gabriel Dan is a former soldier in the Austrian Army who returns from a Siberian prison camp some time after the First World War. He arrives in an unnamed eastern town at the gates of Europe and lodges in the huge Hotel Savoy. The owner is absent, and the guests are odd, deranged, longing for salvation, dreaming of a release from the unbearable tensions of their lives. A former citizen who has made his fortune in the USA is rumoured to be on his way home - and murder and chaos ensue.
Written in 1923, Hotel Savoy is a dark, witty parable of Europe in the shadow of fascism and war: this is Roth at his best.
Set in the early days of the Russian Revolution, Tarabas tells the story of Nicholas Tarabas, a young revolutionary, shamefully dispatched from St Petersburg to New York by his outraged family. During a visit to Coney Island's amusement park, the deeply superstitious Tarabas learns from a gypsy that it is his destiny to be both a murderer and a saint and, following a fight with a local cafe owner, he flees back to Russia as war with Austria is declared. Following his rapid promotion to captain, Tarabas gains a fearful reputation among his soldiers and the local villagers, until a miraculous discovery unleashes a chain of events that see him undergo a final, dramatic transformation. It is Roth's special gift that, in Tarabas's fulfilling of his tragic destiny, the larger movements of history find their perfect expression in the fate of one man.