2 books by Gregor von Rezzori
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Overview: Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen.
The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Abel and Cain
In 1985, Gregor von Rezzori published an English translation of a novel entitled The Death of My Brother Abel. The ambition of the work, certainly the most brilliant and extravagant of Rezzori’s brilliant and extravagant career, was immediately recognized, but the translation was deemed faulty. Now Abel appears in a new, corrected translation along with, for good measure, the prequel that Rezzori promised in its last pages, Cain, previously only available in the original German. Here Abel and Cain are finally united as Rezzori intended, giving readers a chance to appreciate the phantasmagoric and bacchanalian genius of one of the twentieth-century’s great imaginative provocateurs and entertainers.
The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags back and forth across the middle of the twentieth century, from the 1918 to 1968, taking in the Jazz Age, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg trials, and the explosion of postwar commercialism. At the center of the book is the unnamed narrator, holed up in a Paris hotel in the hopes of turning the autobiographical notes he’s accumulated over the years into an actual novel. Is this book—a collage of sardonic and passionate set pieces about love and work, sex and writing, families and nations, and human treachery and cruelty—an actual novel? Or is it a betrayal of the very desire to write a novel, as the narrator feels he has betrayed his editor and sometime addressee, the writer manqué Schwab, drinking himself to death, Abel to the Cain that the garrulous, guilt-ridden, shameless narrator takes himself to be.
In Cain, the prequel promised at the end of Abel, the narrator gains a name, Aristide Subics, though perhaps Subics is in fact Schwab, and perhaps Schwab is the one who has betrayed his friend Subics. Or is it Rezzori, the putative editor of the book, who has made the fatal error of trying to tell the story of an era whose life was a lie? One way or another, in Cain, primarily set in the bombed-out, rubble-strewn Hamburg of the years just after the war, the dark confusion and deadly confrontation and of Cain and Abel, inseparable brothers, goes on.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just this relationship that has blinded him to—and makes him complicit in—the terrible realities of his era.
Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.
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