Luke Slattery

‘Now that Joseph Roth has been thoroughly absorbed into English, it seems right to ask whether there is a more joyously unbridled – and a more appealing – writer of narrative fiction in the literary tradition.’ Luke Slattery on a new translation of Joseph Roth’s non-fiction.

25 years after Leonardo Sciascia’s death, Granta has reissued most of his translated titles. These short, acrid tales are written in a dry Stendhalian style. Braided around their assured plotlines are philosophical dialogues on morality and politics, justice and mortality: universal themes with a distinctive Sicilian inflexion.

The finest travel narrative of the twentieth century can at last be read in full in the second decade of the twenty-first, some 80 years after the events it describes and two after its author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, died at the splendid age of 96. These temporal perspectives are worth noting at the outset because time – its passing and loss, its magical recuperation and crystallisation through the white magic of narrative – is at the heart of Leigh Fermor’s enchanting trilogy.