Joseph Roth and the Radetzky March

I feel guilty about admitting it, but I don't read as many novels as I should. It's too easy for this camper to get bogged down, or at least submerged ( to use a less defeated sounding intellectual-undertaking-as-water-crossing metaphor) in non fiction tomes, the weightier the better. So of course as the Paper Hats tour winds to a close, I am gleefully lost in the first volume of Shelby Foote's three part opus on the American Civil War.
But I am so glad that "The Radetzky March" came into my life. This is a stunning novel, full of humanity, sadness, bleak humor, and an unhappy terminus. Penned by the great Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, "Radetzky" covers the waning years of the Hapsburg empire and the decline and fall of one its aristocratic families, the Trottas.
Brought to fame by military glory in the mid 19th century, by the dawn of the 20th the heir to the Trotta dynasty is a n'er do well named Carl Joseph who dreams of imperial glory but loses himself in sordid romantic affairs, gambling, and alcoholism while stationed at a border town in the far eastern stretches of the empire. I couldn't help but see traces of W Bush in Carl, weak headed and easily guided by emotion or urge, yet holding the name of a once illustrious family.
Roth himself grew up in eastern Galicia, one of those European geographic stretches lost to historical memory. Growing up, Roth was surrounded by Polish, Yiddish, German, Slovakian, and Ukrainian culture, all held together by the almost ethereal guiding hand of the Hapsburg monarchy. Like most young men of his time, Roth served in World War One and emerged from it alive, while the empire he had been born into did not. The fall of the Hapsburgs was to inform his writing in a lasting way; Roth was able to foresee that reactionary nationalism would replace archaic imperialism with haste and impetuousness, and minorities such as his would be the brunt of the fury. He was a successful journalist in Berlin until the rise of the Nazis forced him into exile in Paris, where he quite literally drank himself to death, Keith Whitley style. His beloved wife had succumbed to schizophrenia years before, and less than a year after Roth's untimely death, she was killed by the Nazis as part of euthanasia experiment.
So while Roth's life was quite as tragic as his novels, it added to my emotional response while reading "Radetzky", as I am quite sure it has for many readers. His descriptions of the lonely drinkers, the hopeless lovers, the fathers impotently reaching out to help their tragic sons, the old men watching their way of life fade into the dust of the country roads; it is evocative writing that reminded me of the righteous anger and bleak humanity of Celine's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" or Doblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz".