Word: solferino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Berlin journalist named Joseph Roth put this sensitivity into a fine novel, which Eva Tucker has translated beautifully. The novel tells about three generations of the Trotta family, beginning with the grandfather, a Slovene peasant named Joseph who accidentally saves his emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino. Afterwards everyone calls the peasant the hero of Solferino--even the schoolbooks retell the lies about him--and he becomes a baron...
...Carl Joseph becomes a moderately well-meaning lieutenant in an imperial army without much coherence or purpose. He causes the death of his only friend, the regimental surgeon whose memories of his own grandfather--a silver-bearded Jewish innkeeper--remind the lieutenant of the hero of Solferino. Carl Joseph makes love to an older woman, with "the heart of a girl of sixteen...a beautiful secret in a crumbling castle," he runs into debt, leaves the army, is killed in the war, all of it without much coherence or purpose. Not even the emperor can remember any longer just what...
...will or satisfaction--but he still kills people for wanting work that doesn't mean getting tuberculosis. All Roth's jokes, even the quietest, have a hard, tired edge to them. When Carl Joseph realizes that there are countries which haven't heard of the hero of Solferino, Roth says he's as confused as if he had realized...