[...] Roth's details and images are often not primarily visual, in the usual Flaubertian sense. He isn't especially interested in describing the exact colour-shade of a man's moustache, and then likening it, say, to rolled filaments of copper [...] he comes at his images from behind, or sideways, and then climbs towards something at once magical and a little abstract. In The Emperero's Tomb (1938), he pictures a businessman talking about his prospects in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War: 'As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy [i.e. Austria and Hungary].'

red hats become oblatory fires for Franz Joseph