In the final years when alcohol takes possession of Roth’s body yet fails to addle his mind, when the last in a series of female companions moves away from Roth and thoughts of a reinstatement of the Habsburg monarchy are finally abandoned, Pim’s portrait of the writer, living mostly on handouts from other writers (notably Stefan Zweig) and his publishers, is at its most touching and memorable.

As we are told about this life’s conclusion, the price for the unwavering faith of Roth’s religion was full acceptance of the terms of life it laid down. As Hitler’s fascism became ever more violent and threatening over the course of the 1930s, and overwhelmingly so for Jewish citizens, there would be no prospect of voluntary escape into death, as there had been, for example, for Roth’s friend Ernst Toller.

The westward trajectory of Roth’s life from humble beginnings in a Jewish enclave in the eastern borderland of Galicia, through its middle years in the sophisticated metropolises of Vienna and Berlin, was to witness its finale not in Mitteleuropa, where Roth’s heart and spirit had always sought to dwell, but in Paris, one of the last bastions of free Europe, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.

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Though Pim’s conceit of “endless flight” generally seems right on the money, at the end – at least for this reviewer – it comes up a little short. Roth did not fly from Europe, as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and a host of others did. The author of Job: The Story of a Simple Man, Roth’s stunning breakthrough novel about an orthodox Jewish family from Galicia that emigrates to the United States, did not choose to imitate his fiction. Instead, the perpetual flight of his life was suspended in its final moments, and, as I read Roth, fully in accord with his deepest convictions.

For, as Pim elsewhere deftly shows, Roth was a committed European. If Europe draws decisive impetus even today from an idea of social and political convergence through art (the anthem of the European Union, after all, is provided by the poet Schiller by way of Beethoven), this was a Europe Roth could never leave. To this extent, Roth’s life was lived to the last in fidelity with an art-led ideal of supranational belonging, one to whose enduring value his remarkable literature continues to call attention.

Tim Mehigan is Professor of German at the University of Queensland. His most recent book is Robert Musil and the Question of Science (2020).

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