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.
