New York Review Books is going to publish Gregor von Rezzori’s novelistic diptychin all its toxic splendour. Joachim Neugroschel’s 1985 translation of the massive, controversial The Death of My Brother Abel (Der Tod meines Bruders Abel) has been revised by Marshall Yarborough for this publication, and the prequel Cain (Kain. Das letzte Manuskript), translated by David Dollenmayer, will appear in English for the first time.
It is the year 1968, and the middle-aged narrator of The Death of My Brother Abel looks back at his hectic and eventful life from his room in a Parisian hotel. Making use of the copious notes for the unwritten autobiographical novel distributed over the four folders labelled Pneuma, A, B and C, he gives us a disjointed and rant-fuelled account of his turbulent past: early childhood in Bessarabia, the adolescence in Vienna where he witnesses first-hand Hitler’s Anschluss, the…
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