Knowing a little about Roth, this book appears to include autobiographical detail but also a thematic resonance with his better known works, such as The Radetzky March. His writing is very much in a modern European style, the settings inspired by his own travels across the continent, but it’s also a very loose work that doesn’t really hang together. A refugee from reality, Franz Tunda hears that the Great War is over and so he sets out to return to his first love, but is waylaid in the various historic revolutions and uprisings of the time. He ends up starting whole new lives in different major cities and countries of this restless Europe, until finally the object of his affection is in touching distance. Whether he achieves his love or finds some sort of peace isn’t really the point of the book. It is decidedly a picaresque across Europe between the wars, or more precisely, across Europe after the Great War and well before the Second World War appeared on the horizon. Roth’s Tunda is a leaf blown on the wind, and Europe in all its variety and uncertainty the storm that waylays him from any sense of will or self-actualisation. Originally published in 1927, this is Roth trying to make sense of a world still on the verge of change, and Tunda is a stand-in for the soul of Europe, which I know is a construct and ever-evolving, but in Tunda shows a continent of squabbling polities unable to agree on what is what. Three and a half stars