The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth REVIEW

The passage I read toward the end of the video - these are the first few lines of Chapter 8, in the translation by Michael Hofmann:

"In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbors and passersby alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That's how it was then. Everything that grew took long to grow, and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as nowadays we live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively."

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