Gregor von Rezzori

Just out of the hospital and just short of celebrating his eightieth birthday, Gregor von Rezzori begins this intensely beautiful and astringently witty memoir as he sets out on a trip that will take him back to the landscapes of his childhood and youth and forward to new encounters with old demons. In Romania, where he was born and where the aftershocks of the 1989 uprising against corrupt Communism still shudder through the land, Rezzori broods on the nature of a people's devotion to tyrants who enslave them, and on the conflicting oddities in revisiting a homeland after half a century. In Germany - in Hamburg, Berlin, and Cologne, whose dark Carnival revelries he "covers" as a television commentator - Rezzori continues this theme; over decades, he has had ample opportunity to bear witness to the culture of Germany, whose language is as expressive and alluring as its political history is dangerously harsh. And in Pondicherry, India, where he visits the Sri Aurobindo Society, he has further hilarious cause to muse on the peculiar eagerness with which we worship new and old gods. In a finale that is a superbly imagined encounter with a personage whose very name evokes a Europe that is gone forever - Otto von Hapsburg - Rezzori is able to "make his case" in a "summation" of his own views on the culture and continent which he and the Prince share. Above all, in a daring literary tour de force of wonderfully self-deprecating wit, he suggests the underlying impulses of his writing life: his search for some kind of truth, some kind of perfection, in a world despoiled by war and ill will.

In pre-World War II Berlin, a man rises in society by dressing well and frequenting the right night clubs. Eventually he hits the jackpot by marrying the daughter of a munitions tycoon. A study of social climbing by the author of 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 his relationship that has blinded him to and makes him complicit inthe 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.