If you like men who, training to be jockeys:

ride for three hours at the crack of dawn, drink six cups of hot tea, don a rubber vest, shirt, one lightweight and one heavyweight sweater, a leather jacket, and pound the pedals of a bicycle for an hour, then collapse into a steam bath and eat nothing but potatoes with a sprig of parsley for the rest of the week...

then you might like young Gregor, as portrayed unflinchingly in the first four of these five autobiographical portraits, as morally jejune as he is limber. What's remarkable about this book, written late 70's, is the scrupulousness with which the author filters out hindsight. The four first-person vignettes are each slightly skewed (clearly him, but imagined differently) and regretful but leave ample space for the narrator's moral decrepitude to become clear. But you never feel like a modern reader hauling a suitcase of irony; this is carry-on baggage only. These are first-person stories of weakness, unfolding with the inevitability of a morally compromised day.

From the fifth section, the old man looking back from Greece — and don't we all wish we were in Greece — comes this sentence: "one can't believe in a reality that comprises Auschwitz and the Opernball of Vienna at the same time." But that was Rezzori's twentieth century. ( )

Gregor von Rezzor

This is a wonderful novel. The title is ironic. The writing dazzles. Occasionally, just occasionally, I come across a book that wallops me into silence. . . .
( )

Es la irónica, evocadora y deslumbrante reconstrucción de la vida de un hombre, de aristócrata familia, nacido durante la primera guerra mundial, que destruyo el imperio austrohúngaro a través de cinco relaciones significativas con personas judías. ( )

In her introduction to the NYRB edition of this book, Deborah Eisenberg describes it as 'a beautiful thing that's made out of ugly things.'

To illustrate the rare beauty and sensual elegance of von Rezzori's writing, the following passage from the section entitled, Löwinger's Rooming House (p.150 of the NYRB edition) will suffice:

'...I still carry with me the vivid memory of dusty country roads, of oxen sauntering home along them by the orange glow of evening as though paddling through shallows of burnished gold, of the resinous smell of fresh-cut logs, piled high in blocks before black forests above which the green-grass domes of the Carpathian outriders loomed like a child's cutout pattern; or in the midst of this magic, a shepherd boy swathed in sheepskins sitting cross-legged on a tree stump whittling his stick but not looking up; or the dirge of boys unbroken voices through the open windows of a Jewish school, their pale egg-shaped faces framed by long ear-locks; or the stamping of dancers at a peasant wedding, the sweat flying from a fiddler's brow, the girls plaits streaming out from under their slipping head-scarves; of meadows couching the silver of a stream, stalks stalking through its marshes, accelerating and then rhythmically pulling themselves up to an azure sky; sparkling drops of water shooting in streaks from green flax whipped by girls hidden by the willows - these and many other priceless memories....

As to the 'ugly things' that make up the book, : (review to be continued) ( )