The losses of exile

Press, 7 December 1985, Page 20

The losses of exile

Flight Without End. By Joseph Roth. Dent, 1985. 144 pp. $8.75 (paperback). . ,

(Reviewed by.

Agnes-Mary Brooke)

In the attempt to discover our place in the Pacific, our national identity (whatever that may be), there seems to be an accelerated trend to play down our wider cultural heritage. The accumulated cosmopolitan European background of the greater number of New Zealanders seems to be becoming regarded as a bit of an embarrassment, if not a liability, something irrelevant from the Old World with no validity in a Pacific setting. The praise of the new, the rawly innovative in art, music, and literature, is a heyday for the experimentalists and trendsetters. But there is corresponding unease from those who see the best of our cultural heritage neglected, dismissed as irrelevant. But in turning our back so resolutely upon our European inheritance, in order to celebrate our Pacific milieu, we have lost, along with much debris, much of the unique wisdom that an older culture could offer. Joseph Roth is an author whom we have lost along the way. Yet his “Flight Without End” is a remarkable, relevant account of exile, the personal

and national exile of the man without spiritual and physical roots. His central figure, Franz Tunda, takes part in the socio-political and cultural upheaval of the Russian revolution. At first he is an unwilling protagonist, then, for the sake of the girl revolutionary he loves, a total convert. Disillusionment, and his flight into exile comes later, as does his predicament at finding no place for himself in a world of behavioural pretensions and social cliches. This fine translation loses nothing of the author’s narrative gift of simplicity and lucidity. Even more impressive is this writer’s gift of dealing lightly and gracefully with themes which could otherwise have become depressingly heavy going. Joseph Roth was regarded as one of the foremost journalists of his day, and his subtle irony, his finesse in gently examining social mores, make this book deserve a wide readership. At the end, Franz finds himself where the man of intelligence, the critic, the thinker who refuses to be categorised, inevitably finds himself — superfluous to social involvement. Reading this author is a reminder of how little now we offer to the children of this generation from the best of what the past has to offer.