Abel and Cain (New York Review Books Classics)

Still working my way through this remarkable book. It cannot and should not be hurried. So much to ponder. So much to delight. So much to consider. This is a great book and there aren't many of those.

this novel is one of the greatest novels I have read in my life!

I hate to mark down the magnum opus of a writer I very much admire, but this is a bit of a mess. First, it’s not one novel, but two, as Von Rezzori published the first two parts, well, actually three, a long hallucinatory first section, then folders A and B as The Death of My Brother Abel and then some years later folder C as Cain, never before published in English.The Introduction is helpful if not comprehensive. Von Rezzori seemed to still be working on the material at the time of his death, and one wonders if we even have a finished product. There seems to be some effort to portray in one man’s consciousness the history of his times, a la Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist or Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. And much much time, many pages are given over to the frustrating self reflexive strategy of writing about writing, and how hard it is to sit down and write.Despite the repetitiousness and the false starts and unexplained jumps we might see in a portrayal of the dream life, there is a lot of stunning material. There are very sad accounts of the Nazis at work, unhappily but necessarily unforgettable. Von Rezzori takes us to the Nuremberg trials, to Hamburg in the early years after the war, and early and late to Vienna. He decries the Americanization of Europe in its rebuilding through the sixties. He seems to have regretted his years in the film industry, perhaps because it seems to have cheapened him personally.On that personal level, the narrator made a series of poor, unimpressive choices in women. Whether it was an American model 20 years his junior, a fellow refugee, a German streetwalker or an aging international film star, his fixations on these imperfect objects of adoration only show the narrator as something of a myopic fool. The only telling relationship is with a woman 14 years older, Stella, and (spoiler alert) that lacks resolution, necessarily so. Not the first man to experience this deficiency, nor the last, the narrator’s thinking too often emanated from his crotch.I really enjoyed the writer’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his The Snows of Yesteryear. I can’t help thinking that either time or aging, given the scope of what he was trying, kept him from bringing the works reviewed here to the same high level. I’m glad I read it, although it was and is a hard slog, but Abel and Cain is more an oddity than a masterpiece.