Gregor von Rezzori Book order

"Cain was Gregor von Rezzori's last book, a pendant to his monumental The Death of My Brother Abel, and in it he revisits the themes that he explored throughout his literary oeuvre: the origins of Nazism, the physical and moral ruin of Europe, the Americanization of the world, the ever-diminished role of beauty in daily life. But Cain, even as it looks back toward Rezzori's lifework, also represents an advance towards an ever more daringly improvisatory kind of writing. Cain has been described by Michael Kruger as not only the most modern of Rezzori's works, but as a great book, and an English translation of this work that rounds out not only the single biggest project of Rezzori's career, The Death of My Brother Abel, but his career as a whole, has long been overdue. David Dollenmayer, a past winner of the Goethe Institute's Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, has taken on the job"-- Provided by publisher

"The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol," Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author's childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir The Snows of Yesteryear and the trickily titled novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. In The Ermine of Czernopol, Rezzori summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism. The novel, ostensibly centered on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality, gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment, but in which, for all that, "laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals."

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 his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities 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.

Ein Kabinettstück fast Nabokov'schen Ranges, mit ebenso ironischen wie wehmütigen Gedanken über die Alte und die Neue Welt. Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, das Elvis-Mausoleum und Las Vegas - das war das von Rezzori in den achtziger Jahren neu entdeckte mythische Lolitaland.

An account of the author's trip to the Bukovina and places throughout Germany and Italy in his eightieth year presents a portrait of a land still suffering the aftershocks of an uprising against corrupt Communism. By the author of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

Gregor von Rezzori's account of his childhood, recreating the world of Central Europe that vanished in 1938. It sheds a light on influences that have contributed to recent national turmoil. The book centres on the Bukovina - at one time an Austro-Hungarian province, then a part of Romania, and later absorbed into the Ukraine - and, in a series of portraits, describes the family and household that shaped his childhood.