Immersing himself in the perceived glories of a vanished past, Roth tells the tragic story of Mizzi Schinagl, the daughter of a pipemaker, who has fallen in love with a nobleman and cavalry officer--a man of a much higher class. Unfortunately for Mizzi, Baron Taittinger, the object of her affection, has liberally bestowed his charms on too many others. Crushed by the Baron's promiscuities, Mizzi nonetheless finds herself pregnant with his son. Her reputation ruined by the Baron, Mizzi is forced into a bordello after being abandoned by her erstwhile lover.

At the same time, the Persian Shah pays a state visit to the Kaiser. Desirous of an affair with and "exotic" Western woman, the Shah conspires with Taittinger to find a consort. When the Shah decides upon a court nobleman's wife, Taittinger must act quickly to deceive his friend from Persia. Mizzi, surreptitiously chosen for this role, soon finds herself enmeshed in an ironic series of calamitous events in which nothing is what it seems.

The tragic lot that befalls Mizzi provides the cornerstone of Roth's tale, a story of personal and societal ruin set amidst exquisite, wistful descriptions of a waning aristocratic age. In Taittinger, who embodies this spirit of slow decline, Roth has created one of his best "uncomprehending heroes"--a decent but essentially frivolous, limited man, completely unequipped to deal with the consequences of his own actions.

The Tale of the 1002nd Night is a profound master work of the first order, providing an essential link to our understanding of the extraordinary fictive powers of Joseph Roth.

Amazon.com Review
Before his death in 1939, Joseph Roth produced 13 works of fiction--most of them sardonic valentines to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a Galician Jew, not to mention a biting social critic, Roth knew that life under the Dual Monarchy was not exactly flawless. Yet he retained a deep attachment to the old regime, which must have looked more and more civilized as the Nazis came to power. In 1933 he fled to Paris, where he commenced a slow, alcoholically induced suicide--managing, however, to write several more books, of which The Tale of the 1002nd Night was the last to appear.

Like so many of Roth's novels, this one is a celebration of Vienna in its pre-Anschluss days--during the 1870s, to be precise. "At this time," we're informed, "the world was deeply and frivolously at peace." In keeping with the frivolity, perhaps, Roth puts a fairy-tale-like spin on his memories. He opens The Tale of the 1002nd Night with a state visit by the Shah of Iran, transforming historical fact into whimsical fiction. And once he shifts the narrative to Vienna proper, his characters make their entrances and exits with brilliant, dreamlike rapidity. It would be tempting to compare the entire story--which revolves around the seduction and abandonment of the prostitute Mizzi Schinagl by the boneheaded Baron Taittinger--to a puppet show. But these puppets are capable of registering deep pain and transformation. Taittinger, for example, gets to utter the first honest sentence of his adult life: "He had caught himself telling the truth; and for the first time in many years he blushed, the way he had once blushed as a boy when he'd been caught telling a lie." And even Mizzi, the flattest character in a book full of wafer-thin ones, has her moments of electrifying humanity:

She became terribly sad. Her simple soul was briefly illumined, indirectly and at a lower wattage, by the light that makes older and wiser people so happy and so sad: the light of understanding. She understood the sorrow and futility of everything.