'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one'
At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man.
Translated by David Le Vay
This small novel is a masterpiece -- Angela Huth ― Listener
Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading pleasure... A haunting little book, touched by genius ― Guardian
A masterly performance -- Paul Bailey ― Evening Standard
An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose... I want to read more ― New Statesman
Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol... passages of electrifying beauty ― The Times
About the Author
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor's Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker . He died in Paris in 1939.
