His family home, thrice-mortgaged, becomes a boarding house his mother is dying, and he feels the city is no longer safe for his son. Trotta returns from the war to find his wife in thrall to a crop-haired woman professor of aesthetics.

His short chapters, with their abrupt endings and fragmentary first-person narrative, depict a puzzling modern world in which old friends talk politics in bars while “Death stretches his bony fingers” over their drinks.

Roth’s way of tying vivid personal incidents to a wider story of continental decline feels more urgent here. The city has changed, along with the country and indeed all of Europe. Once young and foolish, surrounded by family and influential friends, he is now the last of the Trottas, “alone, alone, alone”. After an interlude in Siberia, the story ends back in Vienna with Trotta closing the shutters of an empty city bar, walking out into a bleak dawn. It begins with the young Joseph Trotta, grandnephew of the hero of the first novel, in his dressing gown in Vienna as his maid opens the shutters to the sun. “The Emperor’s Tomb” ( Die Kapuzinergruft) follows the surviving characters between two world wars, from 1913 to 1938. Now he is releasing a new translation of its sequel, the last novel Roth wrote, first published in 1938.

Michael Hofmann, a poet, translated the book into English in 1995 as part of a larger crusade to bring Roth to a wider audience. His most famous work, “The Radetzky March”, a compressed panoramic novel of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was first published in German in 1932.

Darkness before dawn by ja london