This book one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed was published in 1939 the year the author died. Like Andreas the hero of the story Roth drank himself to death in Paris but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale in which the vagrant Andreas after living under bridges has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed dry-eyed and witty despite its melancholic subject-matter. The Legend of the Holy Drinker was tumed into a film by Enrico Olmi starring Rutger Hauer.