This was a pretty good back. I liked the thematic work especially but it kind of felt like something was missing? Not sure what it was.

While reading this book, I came to realise that how a fictional work can give more information on the history of a period and place than elaborate writings by professional historians. While it does not detail specific events and individuals, after reading 'Flight Without End,' one gets an accurate feeling of what it was like in post-World War I era Europe, and one may even glimpse the making of the disillusionment that ultimately made them fight another World War in the next decade.

Flight Without End by Joseph Roth, tr from German by David Le Vay & Beatrice Musgrave is broadly about the world's indifference to men who went to war, died fighting and men who came back home alive only to realise there isn't any home for them.

The protagonist, a first lieutenant in the Austrian army, Franz Tunda becomes a Russian POW in Aug 1916. He escapes the prison with the help of a Siberian, Baronowickz with whom he stays in a dreary, desolate farm at taiga’s edge, disconnected from the world only to learn in 1919 that WW1 ended a year ago. With a photo of his fiancee clamped to his coat, he wishes to return home to Vienna hoping she would be awaiting his return. But like a leaf blown by the wind that moves offering almost no resistance, he becomes a slave of circumstances of his own volition. He lives in Kiev, Baku, in towns on the Rhine, in Berlin; finally reaches Paris years later where his fiancee is happily married in a rich, aristocratic household for years.

At no point, Tunda feels remorse or heartache, his life dwindles between expectations & resignation. At times sagacious, at others preposterous, always indolent, full of himself, angry at the world around, he is unable to identify with any ruling ideology. He joins the Red Army for the sake of a dashing woman, loves the Revolution because he loves her, then marries a quiet woman at Baku, even has a brief affair with a French aristocrat.

As the narrative switches between first and third person, this disillusioned man's journey in search of a place he can call home lay bare Western Europe’s bias/prejudices towards Russia, hatred for the bourgeois harboured by the proletariat, divide between capitalism and socialism. Each community bragged about its ideology/policies, patronage for art, theatre, music but what is a community that treated poverty like a disease, an epitome of unmanliness. Written with a philosophical tint, the novella is an abstract portrait of conceptions that ruled the world during WW1 years, some maybe still prevail.

Note: The protected PDF sent to Kindle had the first line missing from every chapter. Kindly look into this error so that a reader's ease/joy of reading isn't spoilt.