Volume 32, Number 14 · September 26, 1985
Transcendental Chutzpah
By Gabriele Annan
The Death of My Brother Abel
by Gregor von Rezzori, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 632 pp., $19.95
A lot of Gregor von Rezzori's autobiographical novel is about the overwhelming difficulty of getting it written and how it was begotten by despair upon impossibility. In the end (if it is the end: the English, though not the original German, version finishes with the legend END OF BOOK ONE) it runs to 632 pages. You need to think big about it: think of terms like epoch (1918–1968), epoch-making, Gargantuan, Promethean, apocalypse, holocaust, maelstrom, Götterdämmerung, Wirtschaftswunder, The Decline of the West, A la recherche du temps perdu, the mega-Mann of The Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. At times you may think it is a case of overkill, especially in the hall of sex where every dazzling trophy on the wall is a grand twelve-pointer, whether she be a Francophone mulatto impresario, a freaked-out WASP model, rich Romanian Jewish femme du monde, poor Polish Jewish concentration-camp survivor, French hooker, German hooker, German Hausfrau, German aristocrat, German movie starlet, or French movie star. Sexual boasting is matched by cultural boasting, with classy quotations in every European language dropping like crystals from a chandelier in an air raid. And all this is delivered by a Torvill and Dean of the typewriter, dancing the zapateado upside down on ice.
Review, 2875 words
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