Benjamin Lenz News Today

Toward the close of Keiron Pim’s new biography Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth, we’re told to imagine the great, complex Austrian writer in Saint-Sulpice, which he may or may not have visited. Its Delacroix murals, we’re told, “must have moved Roth’s soul.” But no, they mustn’t. Perhaps Roth thought very little of Delacroix or not at all. Undue speculation plagues the biography genre in general and this volume in particular.