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 in-the 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.