Weights and Measures
  • Published: 27 December 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241307441
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $22.99

Weights and Measures

Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Dec 2017
EBook
5 Oct 2017
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A short, brilliantly evocative novel set in the bleak eastern European borderlands before the First World War

An artillery officer is persuaded by his resentful wife to leave the Austro-Hungarian army to take up a civilian post as inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory near the Russian border. At first attempting to exercise some proper rectitude in his trade duties, he is soon at a loss in a shadowy world of smugglers, profiteers and petty crooks.

This great, painful novel is both a brilliant evocation of the remote reaches of eastern Europe before the catastrophe of the world wars and a frightening picture of the slow capitulation of a good man with traditional standards to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion.
  • Published: 27 December 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241307441
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $22.99
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Praise for Weights and Measures

This small novel is a masterpiece

Angela Huth, Listener

Weights and Measures gave me the purest reading pleasure... A haunting little book, touched by genius

Guardian

A masterly performance

Paul Bailey, Evening Standard

An absorbing fable, dark, beautifully written and with a physical immediacy in the prose... I want to read more

New Statesman

Written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol... passages of electrifying beauty

The Times