Abel and Cain
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This omnibus volume, which collects a revised translation of The Death of My Brother Abel and the first translation of its companion work, Cain (first published in German in 1976 and 2001, respectively), is a masterpiece of excess. The Death of My Brother Abel takes as its subject its unnamed narrator's incomplete novel, or more likely, that incomplete novel is Rezzori's novel itself. For 19 years he has been writing an unfinishable autobiographical epic: "its subject was a continent: the period of a lifetime." Over hundreds of pages the bitter and cosmopolitan narrator recounts his many escapades with Schwab, another writer, "his brother or opponent" in Paris; unfurls stories of his time as an screenwriter in post-WWII Berlin; and intersperses Proustian reminiscences of his childhood as a "fatherless orphan-boy" in Vienna, before "the postwar Ice Age years." In Cain, the narrator gains a name, Aristides Subicz, but its plot largely rehashes the characters and themes of the first work with little added. While not entirely devoid of the sort of casual sexism and racism best left in the past, the narrator's wit and wickedness as well as his audacity in attempting to write a "book that bears witness to man in the second half of the twentieth century" elevates this work. 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.
