The older I get the more I’m interested in what we mean when we say we’ve read a book.

Which is perhaps to say that Roth is wasted on the young. Where Roth foresees the apocalypse, Malaparte is already in it. I remember the Malaparte much more vividly. I didn’t know anything about the Hapsburg Empire then. The Broch was too hard, the Proust I didn’t get to until decades later. Hard books: Proust, Broch, Faulkner, Malaparte.

I haven’t been there in decades: God only knows what they’re like now.Īlong with my backpack, I had an old briefcase-I think it had been my grandfather’s-that I’d filled with books I was determined to read. The villages were mostly empty then, filled with old people and some summer vacationers. A bakery van came by each morning, and once a week a grocery truck would come up from the main valley and stop in the little mountain villages. The house, a tiny thing of stone and wood built in the seventeenth century, was, as we’d say now, off the grid, even more so than most everything was in those days. Many years ago I spent part of a summer at my uncle’s vacation house, in a remote valley of northern Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Welcome to the #germanlitmonth spring readalong of The Radetzky March. Such a good idea!) Rather than responding each week, I’ve chosen the questions that spoke to me the most and answered them in one shot. (Not something I’d seen done before for an online readalong. The novel has three parts: they posed questions for each section. Caroline and Lizzy have organized a group reading of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.

The radetzky march