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Gregor von Rezzori

Abel and Cain (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – June 4, 2019

by Gregor von Rezzori (Author), David Dollenmayer (Translator), Joachim Neugroschel (Translator),

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Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volume

The Death of My Brother Abel and its delirious sequel, Cain, constitute the magnum opus of Gregor von Rezzori’s prodigious career, the most ambitious, extravagant, outrageous, and deeply considered achievement of this wildly original and never less than provocative master of the novel. In Abel and Cain, the original book, long out of print, is reissued in a fully revised translation; Cain appears for the first time in English.

The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags across the middle of the twentieth century, from the 1918 to 1968, taking in the Jazz Age, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg trials, and postwar commercialism. At the center of the book is the unnamed narrator, holed up in a Paris hotel and writing a kind of novel, a collage of sardonic and passionate set pieces about love and work, sex and writing, families and nations, and human treachery and cruelty. In Cain, that narrator is revealed as Aristide Subics, or so at least it appears, since Subics’ identity is as unstable as the fictional apparatus that contains him and the times he lived through. Questions abound: How can a man who lived in a time of lies know himself? And is it even possible to tell the story of an era of lies truthfully? 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.

Print length

880 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYRB Classics
Publication date

June 4, 2019
Dimensions

5.08 x 1.73 x 7.98 inches
ISBN-10

1681373254
ISBN-13

978-1681373256
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From the Publisher


	Abel and Cain	An Ermine in Czernopol	Memoirs of an Anti-Semite	The Snows of Yesteryear
About this book	Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volume.	The beginning panel of a trilogy based on the author's childhood.	These five interconnected stories provide a panoramic yet intimate view of the deterioration of the European aristocracy in the years preceding World War II.	A series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“If a great novel can be recognized by its obsessions, its characters and, above all, its tone, then The Death of My Brother Abel is unquestionably great. Rezzori addresses the major problems of our time, and his voice echoes with the disturbing and wonderful magic of the true storyteller...His is a turbulent, torrential story, full of passion, fire, regret, remorse-stained by anger toward the bourgeoisie, the changing times we live in—the proverbial Zeitgeist—and especially the Second World War and postwar profiteers. Rezzori’s inspiration is fueled by a feverish nostalgia for the past and an even greater nostalgia for an improbable, if not impossible, future. This is no classical novel, not even a modern one; it is its own kind of book, a novel within a novel, or more precisely a number of novels within a novel....Like all true novels, The Death of My Brother Abel provides no answer. The book may come to us from another time, another universe; but we believe in it, and that is what matters.” —Elie Wiesel, The Washington Post (1985)

“Any reader of European literature who has not read Gregor von Rezzori has committed the unthinkable. This is the rare writer who writes with unmatched beauty and skill while celebrating the joys of life.” —Gary Shteyngart

"This volume resurrects the vanished high culture of Mann and Musil’s Europe while also tackling the horrors of the war and its aftermath. These new translations breathe life into von Rezzori’s ambitious and exhausting epic." —Publishers Weekly

“[The Death of My Brother Abel] is monumental in scope and unconventional in technique.... In his depiction of the postwar years, Mr. von Rezzori has given us one of the clearest pictures we have of those Germans who desire to forget the Nazi past, to consider yesterday ‘only a rumor.’” —The New York Times

"This volume resurrects the vanished high culture of Mann and Musil’s Europe while also tackling the horrors of the war and its aftermath. These new translations breathe life into von Rezzori’s ambitious and exhausting epic." —Publishers Weekly

"Von Rezzori's book is episodic, with stories sometimes breaking off in the middle, always with an odd poetry that finds beauty even in the most terrible destruction. A challenging consideration of a murderous history by a knowing witness.” —Kirkus Reviews

“There is a lively intelligence at work, along with a keen if dandified irony, and a justifiable despair.” —Los Angeles Times, on The Death of My Brother Abel

“The reams of existential-anthropological-sociological-psychological brooding never get boring; mounted on the fabulous beasts of Rezzori’s grotesquely inventive imagery, you are carried along like a child on an accelerating merry-go-round until your head spins and you feel exhilarated or sick; or both.” —Gabriele Annan, The New York Review of Books

“Gregor von Rezzori’s novels...have won him many admirers and a reputation as a writer of brilliance and of the highest ambition. He has been likened by critics both here and in Europe to Mann, Grass, and Musil.” —Bomb

“Lost worlds and cities emerge from under von Rezzori’s pen, simultaneously beautifully remembered and richly imagined. Only the truly great writers can do that.” —Aleksandar Hemon

“[Rezzori] describe[s] with bitter hilarity the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of the Nazis. Those world-historical cataclysms are filtered through the miserable, manic consciousnesses of Rezzori’s fictional alter-egos (sex-crazed, decayed aristocrats with bad jobs, guilt complexes, and PTSD). Rezzori’s is ‘a writerly talent that united in itself the qualities of Henry Miller with those of Dostoevsky,’ as the narrator of his magnum opus, The Death of My Brother Abel, puts it.” —Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author

Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During World War II, he worked as a radio broadcaster in Berlin and published his first novel. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films. Among his best-known work is the Bukovina Trilogy—which includes Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, An Ermine in Czernopol, and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear—all of which are published by NYRB Classics.

David Dollenmayer has translated works by Rolf Bauerdick, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Walser, and many others. Dollenmayer translated Cain for Abel and Cain.

Joachim Neugroschel (1938–2011) was a translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish literature. He also published poetry and translated and edited multiple anthologies of Yiddish literature. Neugroschel translated an earlier edition of My Brother Abel, which was then revised for NYRB Classics’ Abel and Cain. He also translated Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semitefor NYRB Classics.

Marshall Yarborough is a translator of German literature and a writer. He has revised Joachim Neugroschel's original translation of My Brother Abelfor Abel and Cain.

Joshua Cohen is a novelist and short story writer. His works include the novels Witz and Book of Numbers.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics (June 4, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 880 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681373254
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681373256
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.93 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.73 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,521,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,179 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #22,617 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #62,969 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Brian Arsenault

The 20th Century Made Vivid

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 26, 2019

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Still working my way through this remarkable book. It cannot and should not be hurried. So much to ponder. So much to delight. So much to consider. This is a great book and there aren't many of those.

7 people found this helpful

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Jonny R. Keen

a great literary creation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2019

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this novel is one of the greatest novels I have read in my life!

5 people found this helpful

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Tony Covatta

More an Oddity than a Masterpiece, but Worthy of Notice

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 2, 2019

I hate to mark down the magnum opus of a writer I very much admire, but this is a bit of a mess. First, it’s not one novel, but two, as Von Rezzori published the first two parts, well, actually three, a long hallucinatory first section, then folders A and B as The Death of My Brother Abel and then some years later folder C as Cain, never before published in English.

The Introduction is helpful if not comprehensive. Von Rezzori seemed to still be working on the material at the time of his death, and one wonders if we even have a finished product. There seems to be some effort to portray in one man’s consciousness the history of his times, a la Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist or Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. And much much time, many pages are given over to the frustrating self reflexive strategy of writing about writing, and how hard it is to sit down and write.

Despite the repetitiousness and the false starts and unexplained jumps we might see in a portrayal of the dream life, there is a lot of stunning material. There are very sad accounts of the Nazis at work, unhappily but necessarily unforgettable. Von Rezzori takes us to the Nuremberg trials, to Hamburg in the early years after the war, and early and late to Vienna. He decries the Americanization of Europe in its rebuilding through the sixties. He seems to have regretted his years in the film industry, perhaps because it seems to have cheapened him personally.

On that personal level, the narrator made a series of poor, unimpressive choices in women. Whether it was an American model 20 years his junior, a fellow refugee, a German streetwalker or an aging international film star, his fixations on these imperfect objects of adoration only show the narrator as something of a myopic fool. The only telling relationship is with a woman 14 years older, Stella, and (spoiler alert) that lacks resolution, necessarily so. Not the first man to experience this deficiency, nor the last, the narrator’s thinking too often emanated from his crotch.

I really enjoyed the writer’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his The Snows of Yesteryear. I can’t help thinking that either time or aging, given the scope of what he was trying, kept him from bringing the works reviewed here to the same high level. I’m glad I read it, although it was and is a hard slog, but Abel and Cain is more an oddity than a masterpiece.

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Professor Joseph L. McCauley

The title is inadequate to describe the writing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2022

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I would recommend reading some of v.Rezzori's other books first, just for orientation, because he is always writing about his perceptions of his past. Two captivating books that I read earlier are 'Memoirs of an anti-Semite' and 'Oedipus at Stalingrad'. Memoirs tells you where he's coming from, very straightforward, critical and sarcastic. I have heard from one older German that he's 'too sarcastic'. He wrote in German but his mentality is clearly not German. I've tried reading 'Ein Hermelin in Tschernopol' parallel in German and English but it's taxing. That book is about growing up in the Bukowina. Reading Abel and Cain first, with no background, as a stand-alone-Rezzori would have left me bamboozled. You may get more out of it if you already know how he thinks. It is damned entertaining.

Note added later. You will anyway be bamboozled when you read toward the end of 'Cain'. v. Rezzori tries to illustrate self-referential contradictions in his context that the book is about an author writing a book about himself. Both v. Rezzori and Gödel were Wien residents, v. Rezzori apparently was aware of the incompleteness theorem, or at least the self-referential aspect. I found it hard (boring) to read through the 'I' gyrations and skipped much of that part, but was motivated to go back after 35 years to my abandoned copy of 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'. There are, however, gems hidden in all the chaotic self-referencing.

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