It tells the story of a war veteran who has become a street musician after losing one leg.

Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian reviewed the book in 2000: "Roth's tale has that very European, straightforward, fairy-tale logic that makes everything both inevitable yet strangely nightmarish.

You wouldn't be far wrong to think of Roth as occupying the fourth corner of a square whose other apices are Kafka, Musil and Stefan Zweig."

This portrait of one of the shards of a splintering society is deceptively simple, but will haunt you for a long time afterwards.

"[1] In 2021 the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton published a novel entitled The Pages.