Weights and measures

Weights and Measures was the third Roth novel to be translated into English and one of the the last he wrote, as he drank himself to death in unhappy exile in France.

It is a fable about the disintegration of a good man.

At the insistence of his wife, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army for a civilian job as the Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote territory near the Russian border.

Attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties he is at a loss in a world of smugglers, profiteers and small crooks.

Eibenschutz soon finds he can no longer distinguish law from justice.

When he discovers that his wife is pregnant by his own clerk, he spends more time away from home.

Spending his hours at the border tavern, he find himself hopelessly drawn to a beautiful gypsy woman, Euphemia.

But she is prepared to share the bed of the landlord and Eibenshutz's enemy, Jadlowker, an unprincipled profiteer who has made the tavern a beacon for local smuggling activity...