Novels
- Oedipus At Stalingrad (1954)
- An Ermine in Czernopol (1958)
- Memoirs Of An Anti-semite (1969)
- The Death of My Brother Abel (1976)
- The Orient-Express (1992)
Collections
Non fiction
- The Snows of Yesteryear (1989)
- Anecdotage (1996)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Gregor von Rezzori Books Overview
Oedipus At Stalingrad
A new translation of a renowned, hilarious, and cautionary satire of life in upper class Berlin shortly before World War II follows the social climbing career of young Traugott von Jassilkowski as he attempts to conquer the German aristocracy.
An Ermine in Czernopol
A New York Review Books OriginalSet just after World War I, An Ermine in Czernopol centers on the tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now defunct Austro Hungarian Empire, determined to defend the virtue of his cheating sister in law at any cost. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, engaging us in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and heartbreaking disappointment, in which, however, laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals.
Memoirs Of An Anti-semite
This is a European classic. Set in Rumania, Austria, Germany and Italy between the last century’s world wars, this is a novel of great beauty about men and the histories that define them. Our hero tells of his childhood: his passion for hunting, his love of the wild landscape of Rumania, his ridiculous social snobbery. He leads us through his youth, and between fantastic and colourful stories of Bucharest in the late twenties and early thirties, he dissects his own complicated, at times agonizing, development as a moral creature. We are with him as the Na*zis take over Austria; as his own anti semitism already such a mixture of belief, caprice and compromise is shaken to its core. And later on, we meet him as a much older man, one haunted by his own protean character, by the beautiful, but tragic web of memories and events that together form history, and by the greatest love of his life, a beautiful Jewess. ‘Here is a work that tackles without reproof, without illusions, and without shallow moral judgements; by turns engaged and detached, funny and sad, tender and heartless the phenomenon of anti Semitism…
the tragedy that changed the face of Europe and the world’ Bruce Chatwin.
The Orient-Express
Abruptly leaving his American wife, job, and home, a European born tycoon purchases a ticket for the famed Orient Express and, as he rides across Europe, muses on the differences between Europe as it is and Europe as he remembers it.
The Snows of Yesteryear
Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear. The book is a series of portraits amused, fond, sometimes appalling of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.
Anecdotage
An account of the author’s trip to the Bukovina and places throughout Germany and Italy in his eightieth year presents a portrait of a land still suffering the aftershocks of an uprising against corrupt Communism. By the author of Memoirs of an Anti Semite.