Like Chekhov, [Joseph] Roth took his beginnings in sketches, humouresques, satire, and, like Chekhov, he never seems to have abandoned his belief that the human character is basically flat. Trotta in The Radetzky March, Tunda in Flight Without End, Taittinger in The String of Pearls, are basically all one and the same: dutiful, helpless, out of their depth. The view propounded in his books that though the world and our lives are complicated, we are simple, seems to me to have much to be said for it.

[Roth's] men – not even hollow men, but flat men, cardboard models, clothes-horses – are the perfect servants of, ultimately, a hollow empire; able to swell a throng or progress, to look good on parade – effectively, their last hurrah – but not to fight a war. Their separateness, their anonymity, irrelated and irrelevant little statelets into which they will ignorantly or viciously disappear.

from Michael Hofmann's introduction to The Radetzky March