Customer Reviews

Confessions of a Murderer

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This "Confession" has an atypical structure for Joseph Roth; it's a "second-hand first-person" narrative, just the sort of structure that another Joseph - Joseph Conrad - exploited so brilliantly. The author/narrator who opens and closes the novella can be presumed to speak for Roth himself. His words are only parentheses around the tale told by the Russian exile Golubchik (Little Dove) to a table of strangers over copious drinks one night in a closed bistro in Paris. Golbuchik is the bastard son of a Russian aristocrat, a personage of wealth and power in Tsarist times. Golubchik is inflamed with resentment at his status. By a twist of Fate - and Golubchik is convinced of the inexorable might of Fate - he becomes an agent of the Tsarist secret police, and thus a man who commits heinous crimes against humanity with immunity from any punishment except that which his own conscience inflicts upon him. Yet his most villainous act is a mere side-effect of the murder he commits. But is he truly a murderer? I won't answer that question for you.

It's the portrayal of the 'secret police' -- those 'necessary' evils of any tyranny, whose actions are not answerable even to their own tyrants -- that compels a reader's interest in this book. Golubchik's confession of their villainies, never more than hinted at, is in effect Roth's prophesy of the KGB and the Stasi; as a journalist, of course, he'd had ample exposure to the secret police of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia and of the Third Reich. What he reveals is no secret any more, but just as chilling as it was in the 1920s and '30s. Golubchik himself, or as he describes himself, is tormented by his own double identity, an inseparable bonding of narcissism and self-loathing, a fusion of good and evil that reminds me of the Arian/Bogomil/Donatist heresy that was never thoroughly repressed in the Austro-Hungarian Europe from which Roth emerged. It seems fairly obvious that Roth the novelist intended this "Confession of a Murderer" as a parable or allegory of larger issues, of the inevitable results of arrogant power over the lives of others. In fact, just such a parable as is expressed in the film of that title, "The Lives of Others." But I won't try to explicate Roth's insights; you, dear reader, must save that pleasure for yourself.

Golubchik's narrative incorporates a kind of Faust story. His 'Mephisto' is a mysterious Hungarian, of great elegance but with a peculiar limp, who inexplicably reappears at every moment of decision in Golubchik's life. The bewildered Golubchik comes to believe that, though God is non-existent, his Hungarian shadow is in fact the Devil. That's a perception not necessarily credited by the author/narrative, not at least until the devilish fellow approaches Roth himself... All the more allegorical the story seems!

Roth never quite renders the voice of Golubchik as vividly individual and persuasive as Conrad was able to do, or as Roberto Bolaño does in his 'confessional' novella "By Night in Chile. "Beichte eines Mörders; erzählt in einer Nacht" -- the title in German -- is not one of Roth's finest accomplishments. It falls short precisely because the voice of Golubchik is too generic. That's the reason for my four-star rating, based on my sense that "Confession" doesn't match the literary glory of Roth's "The Rebellion", "Job", and "The Radetzky March". Still, even a four-star novella by Joseph Roth is quite worth reading.

As I read this novel I couldn't help but ask myself, "What is missing?" There was some intangible quality - evident in other Roth novels - that was noticeably absent here. I came to realize that it was a sense of place: this is a story of international scope, bringing us from a peasant's hut in rural Russia to the cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to pre-WWI Paris, and yet none of these places come to life like the Vienna of "The Tale of the 1002nd Night," the Berlin of "Right and Left" or the tramp's paradise of "The Legend of the Holy Drinker." That said, the saving grace of this piece is the story itself, a chilling tale of obsession and murder purportedly told by the former Russian secret agent Golubchick; as he weaves his tale for a rapt audience, much like a ghost story around a campfire, we as readers are drawn into his futile quest to claim the noble name of his real father, his destructive love affair with the flighty Lutetia and his hatred for his half-brother, the rightful Prince. And then just when we have given over our sympathies to this defeated man we are forced to question our perceptions and our notions of the truth. Read this story and you will be enchanted along with the other drunks in the Russian restaurant in the small hours of the morning - that is the true power of this novel.

The premise of this novel offers so much - a taut murderous confession in one sitting by a man who still professes to consider himself "a good man". Yet given the narrator spends the rest of the novel berating himself or rather wallowing in his consistently evil conduct and repeated acts of atrocity, I never detected any conviction that he regarded himself as inherently good.

It can be difficult to really gauge a novel when not reading it in its first language - a gifted as the translator might be. I found this novella clunky and tiresome, with no pacing or suspense. The novel grinds towards the inevitable without engendering any sympathy for Golubchik or those who suffer at his hands.

I would not recommend this novel.