Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori, David Dollenmayer (Translator), Joachim Neugroschel (Translator)

In 1985, Gregor von Rezzori published an English translation of a novel entitled The Death of My Brother Abel. The ambition of the work, certainly the most brilliant and extravagant of Rezzori’s brilliant and extravagant career, was immediately recognized, but the translation was deemed faulty. Now Abel appears in a new, corrected translation along with, for good measure, the prequel that Rezzori promised in its last pages, Cain, previously only available in the original German. Here Abel and Cain are finally united as Rezzori intended, giving readers a chance to appreciate the phantasmagoric and bacchanalian genius of one of the twentieth-century’s great imaginative provocateurs and entertainers.

The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags back and forth across the middle of the twentieth century, from the 1918 to 1968, taking in the Jazz Age, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg trials, and the explosion of postwar commercialism. At the center of the book is the unnamed narrator, holed up in a Paris hotel in the hopes of turning the autobiographical notes he’s accumulated over the years into an actual novel. Is this book—a collage of sardonic and passionate set pieces about love and work, sex and writing, families and nations, and human treachery and cruelty—an actual novel? Or is it a betrayal of the very desire to write a novel, as the narrator feels he has betrayed his editor and sometime addressee, the writer manqué Schwab, drinking himself to death, Abel to the Cain that the garrulous, guilt-ridden, shameless narrator takes himself to be.

In Cain, the prequel promised at the end of Abel, the narrator gains a name, Aristide Subics, though perhaps Subics is in fact Schwab, and perhaps Schwab is the one who has betrayed his friend Subics. Or is it Rezzori, the putative editor of the book, who has made the fatal error of trying to tell the story of an era whose life was a lie? One way or another, in Cain, 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.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, German Literature, Literature, 20th Century, Classics, Ukraine

880 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen.

The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.

He died in his home in Donnini, Italy in 1998.

Reviews

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rambling mess in all the right ways. “Abel and Cain” is an older man’s reflection of his life in Europe. Rezzori harkens back to the aristocratic zeitgeist that existed between the two WWs (aka the now defunct Middle Kingdom of Yurop), remembers past romances, fumes on the state of literature, and struggles with the memory and death of his closest friend (not a spoiler).

This might seem straightforward enough, but Rezzori wants nothing to do with straightforward. The structure and prose are what really make this book standout. ‘Abel and Cain’ is a maximalist effort, so it will not be to everyone’s liking. Rezzori demands your full attention with jumping timelines and incomplete thoughts. The structure mimics disordered memories as they might exist in one’s head (“I’m sorry I’m showing all this in such disorder, but that’s also how memory functions- if it functions at all.”). But it’s good stuff and reads easier once you get used to the style. It’s also pretty damn funny and entirely original.

I recommend reading this at a deliberate pace so that you can give it your undivided attention. It is very much worth the effort. I considered going with five stars, but we'll settle with high four. I reserve the right to adjust upward, however.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had immediately become extremely excited about the prospect of New York Review Books’ forthcoming edition of Gregor von Rezzori’s ABEL AND CAIN when it was first announced, and I was determined to acquire a copy very shortly after its appearance on the market. This was clearly one of the major literary events of the year. The book in question came out in June, and I did indeed purchase a copy with something not unlike haste. As it should so happen, there was a major music festival going on in my hometown in June, and my festival pass, allowing me access to all concerts and venues, also made all manner of discounts available to me from local restaurants and retail operations. On my way to see some bands outdoors in a park not terribly far from where I live, I made a point of popping into a favourite bookstore immediately adjacent to the park, where for one week I was entitled to a 20% discount upon presentation of my festival wristband. My tendency is to go into bookstores and, no matter how devoted to any particular course of action I may be, invariably spend an obscene amount of money, leaving with a burden of as many as ten books. It’s utterly pathological. In this particular instance—especially cash-strapped, I suppose, and possessed of an uncommon single-mindedness—I entered the bookstore, made directly for Fiction, directly for the Vs, found ABEL AND CAIN, exploited my temporary right to a not insubstantial discount, and got the hell out of there, taking my new book with me to the adjoining park so as to check out some bands. Again, this was a marked deviation from how I generally go about procuring my reading materials. Anyway, I am in the park, we are between sets, and, sitting under a tree where I have gone to enjoy some shade, I open my new book and take a perfunctory gander, knowing it will be awhile before I am able to award the text proper study. (September, as it would turn out.) As part of this perfunctory inspection I was of course going to have to take a look at the introduction from the redoubtable Joshua Cohen, a massively accomplished writer whose most recent novel I very much enjoyed, and a man who is, it just so happens, though comparatively an international behemoth, close to exactly ten months younger than myself. Cohen’s intro begins with a bravura paragraph of commendable brevity: “If you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe ABEL AND CAIN in three sentences, this is what I would answer: Murder. Murder. Murder.” That’s some opening. If I hadn’t already been sold on the massive ABEL AND CAIN this certainly would have done the trick. Sitting under that tree in that park on a lovely summer day, I found myself immediately taking a photograph with my phone of the page in question, cropping the photograph appropriately, and texting the resultant image, containing the quoted paragraph, to my friend Laura. Laura, you see, is well aware of my yen for the literary imagination’s love affair with homicide. Cohen’s opening salvo actually has a great deal more to it than may at first be immediately apparent. It is devilishly clever. You see, this whole idea of being tasked with summing up the literary work in question, the two Gregor von Rezzori novels (of shared phenotype) combined in ABEL AND CAIN, into a handy three sentence pitch, an indignity common to those narrative artists who find themselves in dalliance with agents from the world of commerce, is a central organizing element in THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL, the first of the two novels collected in this edition, wherein the narrator of 99% what we find in THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL and its follow-up, simply entitled CAIN (appearing in this edition for the first time in English translation), begins his disquisition by directly addressing the literary agent Jacob G. Brodny, “superman of the literary business in the finest neon-haloed American way,” with whom he has just met up in Paris and who has asked our narrator on that occasion to sum up the novel he is writing in three sentences, a task said narrator has found not only vexing but literally impossible, the novel in question, which has taken up most of his adult life and which has at the same time found nothing remotely like a container for itself, having long ago asserted itself in our narrator’s mind as by necessity needing to grow and expand in a manner analogous to how cancer cells go about their ravenous, ruinous business. It is not until well into the work that our narrator is given a name. Aristides Subicz. This is to become the fictional name of our author of highly personal and fervidly heterogeneous autofictions (as well as subject of a few interjections offered by other voices); a name we might imagine our not-especially-reliable narrator having been born with, having adopted for himself, or having had bestowed upon him at some unspecified moment along his life’s immutable trajectory. The injunction to crassly distill the project that has consumed his life (which may indeed be his life) produces a lengthy explanation concerning why the idea is preposterous, this itself merely one of innumerable possible points of entry into the radically inchoate life’s work, though it happens to be the reader’s (following a very telling introductory vignette from the perspective of a sex worker who has just had a practically cosmic encounter with a man who would appear to be our resident confabulator). Anyway, I beg your pardon, but let’s momentarily back up. Murder. Murder. Murder. Joshua Cohen’s a posteriori elevator pitch. Tasty, sure, but is it, uh, adequate? Well, it is a lovely rhetorical flourish kicking off a really brilliant and entertaining little essay, the next step of which involves Cohen exhaustively listing all kinds of murder from “first-, second-, third-degree” to genocide and even deicide. The horrors of history figure, the concentration camps and extermination facilities of the Nazis looming especially large. These crimes are endemic to the human animal and its sundry systems, and the Second World War can hardly be said to have satisfactorily purged us of them. How about this typically caustic aside early in THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL? “Around us, the lovely city of Paris hummed and seethed (some fifteen million inhabitants when you include the suburbs: first-class nuclear target).” But the two novels are very much about history as something only intelligible in terms of the private experiences of the individual situated therein; what we are made to concern ourselves with are the crimes, should we interpret them as such, of a man we will belatedly come to know as Aristides Subicz. Death has touched the life of Subicz as it touches us all, but what he is in large part grappling with is his culpability as regards to certain deaths, especially those of his Lola Montès-style high-class courtesan mother (Ilse, her stage name Maud, should we agree to consider a bed a stage), his Jewish lover Stella at the hands of the Nazis, his Nazi-sympathizing cousin Wolfgang (“my brother Abel […] the born sacrificial animal, the smooth slaughter-sheep …”), and his alcoholic book editor frenemy Schwab (who dies of his vices in 1964 immediately after a visit to Subicz, who has long proven unable or unwilling to produce anything resembling a completed novel despite innumerable advances). Though Subicz is wrestling with culpability, as stated, we certainly cannot say, based on the evidence to which we are made privy, that our primary narrator could in any way be held criminally responsible for any of these deaths. He also suffers a reoccurring nightmare over many years in which he murders a woman, an old crone, not perhaps altogether dissimilar to the murder victim in Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, though in the nightmare Subicz believes his is committing this heinous act to contravene efforts to extort him. The tile ABEL AND CANE, echoed in the titles of the two individual novels, obviously references what the OLD TESTAMENT would have us believe is the first murder. I think it very telling that the title of the first novel, THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL, the more famous and by some considerable measure the longer of the two, might seem to suggest that the novel in question might be something along the lines of the nearly-seven-hundred-page exculpatory fib produced by a Cain. I think this telling precisely because of how it prepares us for a work that we will come to discover is primarily about how a writer might use the stuff of personal experience for the creation of fiction. We might ask ourselves if ABEL AND CAIN is an explicitly autobiographical novel, perhaps even a kind of roman à clef. The work is actually largely about how the answer to that question could only ever be both yes and no. How much of Gregor von Rezzori is contained in Aristides Subicz? Certainly a great deal, though the extent of that is beyond anything the reader could ever know. The biographies of the two men are extremely similar, but they differ in a great many key ways that draw attention (with intention) to themselves. Both men are products of an Austro-Hungarian empire that would no longer exist in the aftermath of two successive world wars, both have connections to what would come to be Romania, both men ended up stateless residents of Greater Europe, and they each dabbled or dabble in screenplay writing. However, it is extremely notable (and noticeable) that von Rezzori was born at the outset of the First World War, Subicz at its end. Von Rezzori had considerably more success as a writer of literary fiction than does Subicz, who has no such success whatever (in the traditional sense). Crucially, CAIN contains a preface by a fictional and pretty detestable film producer who tells us of Subicz’s death in an automobile accident in January of 1968, the timing and inconvenience of which the film producer in question himself interprets as an unpardonable betrayal. This is a death we have seen scrupulously foreshadowed in THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL, a major theme of which is Subicz’s habitual vehicular irresponsibility. (A beautiful passage in the earlier novel culminates with “I don't cudgel my brain about what could happen if I'm doing a hundred ten and a tire bursts or a piston jams because of some worn-out valve in the bowels of my car. The results wouldn't exactly be edifying, but that's life, things like that happen, not all miracles have ceased …”) Von Rezzori would die suitably aged and in the more or less customary fashion thirty years after his literary creation bought the farm speeding recklessly on the road to Cannes. What von Rezzori and Subicz would most obviously seem to have in common is a very particular kind of 20th century experience of displacement reflected through considerations pertaining to the literary vocation. This is a novel consisting of two novels which themselves consist of three Folders, the first of which commences on page 263. It is also a literary work about how to go about writing the literary work we are reading, setting out as it is from a knowledge that it “has to be told as the ever-present historical content” of its author’s “presentness.” As Subicz has it: “In seeking my self I seek a European continuity. This European continuity is to by found neither in the museum existence of these cities nor in my present self. Except, as I said, in an occasional split second of recognition which makes my search the more intense, and the more futile.” ABEL AND CAIN is anything but linear. It is more like a thick geology of dazzling false starts, stacked one atop the other. Subicz’s life has progressed from his early childhood with his courtesan mother enjoying the delights of the Côte d’Azur and other playgrounds for the upper crust, then onto stultifying Vienna, then Salzburg, Bessarabia, Berlin, a stopover at the Nuremberg trials, then Hamburg, finally Paris. The two novels in ABEL AND CAIN are written in direct engagement with the whole of personal history in its immediate presentness, employing myriad techniques, tending toward self-interrogation. We know with certainly that Gregor von Rezzori knows of what he speaks. Literary pursuits are framed here as personal struggles merged with the spectral “as-if,” the business of imagination and creation in search or a cumulative expressive power. The expression “as-if,” notably, is also directly utilized to describe elements germane to sex work, especially when it involves sadomasochistic role-playing; a prostitute specializing in dominance happens to serve as a key conduit through whom the womanizing Subicz’s work in the postwar German film industry comes to the attention of an important German publisher who wastes no time in sending poor besotted Schwab off to court the mystery genius. One senses that von Rezzori is saying something very personal himself when he has Subicz declare that it was on the 12th of March, 1938, in Vienna, “the temperature eleven degrees below zero Celsius,” that the first half of his life (or perhaps more strictly his first life in toto) came to an end. The second life is a groundless purgatory of drift and abstraction. (WWII: “a vile abbreviation for a collective suicide, by the way.”) Joshua Cohen tells us that Gregor von Rezzori did not fit in terribly well with the postwar German literary intelligentsia, typified by writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass (the latter of whom Cohen tells us is almost certainly being pilloried in the form of ABEL AND CAIN’s cantankerous literary sensation Nagel.) Cohen sees in von Rezzori a fidelity with Austro-Hungarian literary sensibilities such as those of Herman Broch, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Stefan Zweig, eminences from a suicided world. Both Herman Broch and Joseph Roth experienced a displacement similar to that undergone by von Rezzori. Hardly a day goes by that I fail to reflect upon Joseph Roth’s grim 1939 death, deep as the man was into alcoholic penury and the disconsolations both of exile and unavoidable oncoming conflagration. ABEL AND CAIN could be said to place the unblinking journalistic first-person testimonial perspective of Roth within the teeming, vertiginously brilliant literary landscape of Broch, reference to the latter underlined when our narrator tells us that the residents of the city of Vienna were “sleepwalkers” long before the city itself perished, having lost the ability to dream itself. ABEL AND CAIN is not only one of the monumental literary achievements of the 20th century, it is also a key work serving the integration of the self into an incontestably major literature. Clearly von Rezzori believes that this is a task he has been called to perform. ABEL AND CAIN tells us very directly: the novel should be autofiction precisely because of what we learned from Heisenberg, namely that the observer is always incorporated into what is observed, each in a constant state of mutual transformation.

[Tod Wodicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a bad novel. By design, I almost suspect. It almost totally fell apart for me in it's final third, like Musil again - imagine if Musil was even more of a tiresome dick and had gone and read Thomas Pynchon - and I just couldn't. Had to stop reading. That said, it also contains shining spells of some of the best writing I've read in recent memory. Page after page that makes you stand up straight in your brain.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you can believe it there are moments where this 20th century austrian novel start to drag. probably one of the most neurotic things i’ve ever laid eyes on. 4 stars

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well this is a masterpiece such as gravity’s rainbow, the recognitions in the search of the lost time, etc. etc. go and read it

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rezzori Abel and Cain.
I was attracted to this novel by its mittel-european associations and its size. I expected a modernist text but it confounded this expectation. Clearly, a novel of the 60s counterculture, although pretty much nihilistic in comparison with the over- weaning seriousness of the leftist politics of its time. And not in anyway a novel concerned with simply the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the rise of bourgeois mentality into cultural dominance in the 20th century. But a novel written by a Romanian-stateless orphan with a footloose, flailing, grasp on what might be termed national identity and loyalty. So, quite like Musil, but not; quite like Joyce, but not; and nothing like Proust.
But three or four key themes emerge in this long, highly (consciously) repetitious novel. One is, a concern with rationalism in its expression in the 20th century novel and other literary forms. This is particularly seen in his digs and longer forms of criticism of the writer Nagel, a popular but intellectual novelist, a character who is a little like Günter Grass (I’m guessing this is who Rezzori had in mind), but is also seen in his attitude to Freudian psychology, modern cinema, where they as texts concern themselves with Rezzori’s own concerns with analysing the 20th century’s cultural mind-set and the two world wars associated with it. In contrast to these, Rezzori pursues a form, an erotics, of what can be likened to a worried fretting intense condition of negation and repetition. Another theme is linked to this – a spasmodic style that conveys repeatability rather than narrative burdened with linearity, plot development.
This in turn is added to by Rezzori’s adoption of a form of utopian modernist-form of urbanism where experience is seen as formed by the modern city. This is seen as having the potentiality to ‘vaporize’ 20th century manifestations of bourgeois tropes of self and identity. This resort to some type of location of experience, along with other essentializing ideas (a time, for example, when language was free of writing or scripts; an ideal Ur of un-regulated ego) lets the novel down – it fails in delivering to the reader an adequate sense of these ideals as achievable/recoverable.
Rezzori sets himself against conventional literary narrative because it is implicated in the 20th century’s myth of rationality that pervades modern man’s consciousness – what he calls ‘our allegedly rationalist yet ardently myth-believing century’ (509). He seems here to be with Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and the problem of writing after Auschwitz, as well as the concerns of The Dialectic of Enlightenment where modernity is depicted as a socio-political tragedy. His anti-Freudianism comes through in the regular denigrations of bourgeois life and experience, culture, which itself is rationalizing and undermining of any hope of self-realization. This concern, in fact, seems more prescient of Deleuze than simply anti-Freud:

It is ridiculous to hold fast to the old, out of date idea of action, to the obsession with activity or passivity vis-à-vis history – this world means something only if I had a history in the absolute sense, were allowed to have a history. This history would the skin, the solidifying envelope, of the person. It would give me contours – and thus form. What once held together my SELF (at least in my imagination), giving it distinguishable, recognizable form, was the notion of a personal history. But this now proves to be a typically subjectivist error, showing only my infantile limitation of vision; it is schizothymically autisitic, correlating with my bourgeois worldview and leptosomic habitus: superreality enlightens me, makes me understand that my conception of self is completely out of proportion. 458
In contrast, Rezzori (and the character(s) Subicz/Schwab) moves away from conventional literary form, seen as an abstraction, the form that the writer Nagel (Grass?) adopts - an explanatory, a comforting style which coincides with the way the bourgeoisie likes to form its self image. Thus, in Uncle Ferdinand is:
‘a bizarre retro-morphosis occur(s), a development back into a species and genus, which makes the individual recede and the type come to the fore...’ (153-4)
Again, instead of narration there can only be repetition which is in contrast to Nagel’s literary concern only to show, prove, the role of historical necessity, a ‘final European attempt to insert an orderly structure into the absurdity of existence...’ (352). Conventional writers, even radical ones like Nagel/Grass, are the ‘clowns’ of the bourgeoisie (656); entertainers of the dominant cultural class. Instead, like a phenomenologist who will not evaluate but just continually describe an object from multiple points of view and write these impressions down non-evaluatively, Subicz/Rezzori continually goes round and round the events of the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938; of the introduction of the Deutschmark, of his failed marriage; of his affair with Stella; of the prostitute Gisela; the ‘rubble murderer’; his Raskolnikov- like dream of murdering an old woman; of the old woman Viennese flower seller running to heil Hitler in the Anchlaus.
So Subicz’s style is halting, recursive in its subject matter, or what he calls spasmodic, ‘a style that has something nervous and spasmodic in its incessant changes of milieux and moods’ (358). Subicz needs to engage with the element of ‘quicksilver’ (842) of the times. He wants to get away from unrepeatability, even to the very core of desire, to form a repetitive erotics of style and the self:

Smash the fiction of bodies that imprison us and keep us locked apart; smash the fiction of woman that makes me the fiction of man; smash the fictions of solitude, uniqueness and unrepeatability which exclude us from the world, splice me away from oneness with God and His cosmos...333
But Rezzori is no nihilist, as the final words of this quote suggest. Ultimately he draws back from the absurd, from negation (negative dialectics) and clings to new old standards, like the city (‘Anthropos’) and nature. Subicz/Rezzori, in relation to his, continuously resorts to the sky as a kind of empyrean fixture- a standard:
Under the sky, air, in whose moods and whims I am greeted again by all the promise of my childhood, all the delights I expected of the world...(81)
The sky is glimpsed amidst the debauchery of a brothel, a glinting square between the dark buildings of Berlin or Paris. The sky is, however, seen in molecular forms, volatile, ether, but a refrain, a standard that may have mutations. So too this dynamic romanticism is linked to a type of Edenic era before the Fall of the invention of
...the vice of writing abstracted even the absurdness into material that could be experienced at second and third hand: into book-page reality...306
Similarly, the resort to the city, either the city of modernity that ‘vaporizes’ being but which, in avoiding it’s 20th century manifestation in the American and Disneyland form, might offer ‘a promise, you understand: the Jerusalem still to be built: ANTHROPOLIS’ 402 Modernity held out the promise of Anthroplis but it was betrayed, essentially by a skewered, rationalized modernism that could not develop the imagination to realize it:
I am a foundling of this myth, a latecomer to an era that had set out to dream the dream of man as a blissful inhabitant of the ANTHROPOLIS but was born into an age of maggots...369
At places in this novel I was reminded of Sloterdijk’s Critique. Both texts are concerned with the betrayal of modernity, the 20th century’s journey of western culture to Auschwitz and liberalism, fascism, communism. At one point Rezzori criticises modernist writers like Joyce and Proust for betraying critical reason, for becoming the modernity-betraying ‘Eulenspiegals of our time’ (656). And in post war states, it is a similar underlying cultural and rational-legalistic absurdism that put on

trail Nazi leaders as war criminals ‘on a very flimsy legal basis’. So, as the novel progresses this critique turns back itself onto Subicz:
...is enjoying his role as the prankster Till Eulenspiegal, surely partly out of schoolboyish spirit of revenge against his one- time friend Nagel...821
So, perhaps, in the end, Rezzori realizes, doubts, and see the limits of his particular novelistic form of a critique of cynical reason, the danger of becoming the cultural clown rather than a critically aware Diogenes’ cynic.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Death of my Brother Abel around 10 years ago, it blew me away then. It is without doubt one of the best books of the 20th Century, the author notes that he's writing a magnum opus to win the Nobel Prize and that he's better than his friend Nagel (alias for Gunter Grass). Rezzori's book is much better and he should have won the Nobel prize, he jokes they'll give to John Lennon - and he was presciently close - they gave it to Bob Dylan recently !

Brother Abel jumps back and forth through the 20th Century - he's been asked (in 1968) for a film script and told to sum it up in 3 sentences. This isn't possible, and the narrator ends up providing much of his life story from 1920's to 1960's. The book is about the loss of old Europe, the destruction of WW2 and the banality of modern Americanisation which is making everything the same. It's a complex book but worth investing the time, and so I was keen to read it again when NYRB brought out this edition. The translation is as before, with very minor modifications by Marshall Yarbrough. I haven't changed my opinion - the book is still amazing (Definitely 5 stars), contains numerous gems of sentences like: " When nuptially white paper is irrigated by mymidons of script and becomes gravid with significance"

But in this NYRB edition there's another book - Cain.
We're told Brother Abel came from 2 files of notes marked A and B. Cain is the third folder marked C - it wasn't published in Rezzori's lifetime and hasn't been published in English before this edition.

I can't help feeling that Cain is the outtakes from Abel that Rezzori realised wasn't good enough. He must have tried for 10 years to turn it in to a sequel/alternative novel with same characters and realised it wasnt comparable.

I'm pleased it's been published and translated, but it's not the same quality as Abel. It's the same story and characters, but different views, incidents etc - it's patchy and not a novel that bears comparison to Death of my Brother Abel, but then what could be ?

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is perhaps the anti-novel par excellence. It's a novel about a novel that is never published, that remains in protean form, left behind in a series of folders. It's arguably one the last great novels of late modernism. It's form, in whatever semblance of form that it has, is cubist. The narrative, though fragmented, has a sense of temporal logic, collapsing several isolated moments spanning from the interwar period to the Economic Miracle of Post-War West Gemany. Its production of space is remarkable, representing the zeitgeists of Paris, Berlin, Austrria and the frontiers of Romania. And its topicality is inexhaustive, ruminations spanning from the toxic cultural industry to personal failures. And it's multivocal. At times it's extraordinarily difficult to locate the "I" of the narrator.

Truthfully, rating this novel was difficult. On a level of aesthetic achievement it's closer to 5, but on a level of personal enjoyment it's closer to a 3.

To sum it up, I guess, to use the trite expression, I'd call it a beautiful failure.

[iman ben errabeh]

i forgot what it is like to read an 800 page book. it’s heavy, i’m lost and i think i just missed my bus stop. lovely chaos and confusion, but what if it’s not because of the book but the story itself? it’s always the age old question, and maybe size does matter.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book about a writer writing a book. How many literary novels and works of literature are simply compilations of writers' notebooks full of ramblings? In the same style as William Gass's The Tunnel, Abel and Cain is cobbled together from literary fragments and disparate scenes, some of which seem totally random and others of which are very eloquent, stirring, and occasionally breathtaking. In the same way, the two books discuss moral questions related to human suffering.

The prose is good here. I would say I enjoyed the book slightly more than I enjoyed The Tunnel, since that other book was unforgivably self-indulgent. This one is still pretty self-indulgent. There were moments of annoyance aplenty. The quirkiness of our main character's perspective, his inchoate tirades, verged on maddening as often as they flowed like milky outpourings of graceful and sympathetic verbosity.

My favorite parts were when he was spending time with his prostitute. The conversations were interesting. The atmosphere was beguiling. Toward the end of the book we are treated to details related to the Nuremberg trials. After hundreds of pages of intimate details, steaming slices of life and whiny diary entries about authorship and his obsession with the way-more-successful author Nagel, Rezzori brings his themes back to the center of the discussion and indicts various parties for their roles in the tragedy of WWII. His lack of enthusiasm for German might and culture provides much of the fodder for his satirical rants. But the book is mostly about himself. His feelings, failings, laziness, dreams, lusts, and mortality.

We are told that he was trying to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscious of his race. The pretentious claim that the main character, who is a transparently veiled analog of the author, is trying to recreate Joyce's accomplishment by writing the most representative book of his country of his time made me scoff. I would have to say that I consider Magic Mountain much better than Abel and Cain, and that this book is far too sloppy, too inconsistent, to stand as the one great work of its time. But like Thomas Mann's seminal and timeless classic, Abel and Cain was enjoyable to read almost all the way through. It was full of pithy spitballs. It surprised in myriad ways. 'Twas unpredictable, addictive, and always easy to read. You might draw much meaning from its close-packed pages, even as large chucks of its body slips from memory. 

Joshua Cohen, in his inaccurate Introduction, for the first five paragraphs, sums up the book as a collection of murders of various types, listing off the obvious types of murders that exist unnecessarily. Not only is this introductory summation baffling to me after having finished the book, it makes me wonder if he read a different book altogether. There is hardly any space allotted to murder in Abel and Cain. Murders of various kinds occur, as Cohen intimates, and each one takes down separate concepts and people and ideas, but they are always in the background. There is very little action in this novel. It is a novel of literary fluff. The best comparison I can come up with is Solenoid by Cărtărescu—but less surreal. That beefy book is like a cousin to this one. As is The Tunnel, for how it deals with German history and its language.

This is a language-driven book. There is a spooky action at a distance between the reader and the author. You can feel the author's presence and influence at a remove. The author insinuates himself through overuse of nonstandard structure, imagery etc. We are supposed to be engaged with the sentences as vehicles for information. Like any good book lacking plot, it operates through fulfilling our brain's craving for fresh statements. I didn't really sympathize with the characters. I did not get lost in a story. I simply found the experience of sentence perusal enjoyable. For 900 pages. That alone is a feat. Not one worthy of Joyce, but definitely worth your time.  

Here is a list of monolithic German language books I plan to read or have read.
Magic Mountain & Joseph and His Brothers - Thomas Mann
Bottom's Dream - Arno Schmidt
Abel and Cain
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson
Berlin Alexanderplatz and Mountains Oceans Giants
Demons and The Strudlhof Steps by Heimito von Doderer
The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
Both Wilhelm Meister novels - Goethe
The Arcades Project - Benjamin, Walter

Let me know if I'm missing any for my list!

[Christopher Willard · Rating 5 out of 5]

What has von Rezzori written here but a sort of non-institutional based follow up to Mann's The Magic Mountain. This is an expansive novel with sections of fire that burn the brain and cause you to drop the book in awe. It's thick, it's long, it's worth it. To nutshell it, let's head to a quote, the "insane quality of existence in a constant as-if." Story develops from and folds upon story. Everyone seems to be cited and even Humbert Humbert's name appears. Upper class Zeitgeist between the wars predominates where a proverb says "you can choke a guest with cottage cheese." We find in this European arena, "the seductive devil playing around as Schopenhauer's black poodle" and "cloud castles of the minnesingers and the poetic Wittelsbachs on the mountains." Good luck if you get this from the library because you'll soon realize you need to own it. It is one of those amazingly rich novels that you want to strap to your chest as protection from the world. I wouldn't criticize anyone for doing so.

[Justin Kern · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book seemed at first like it was going to be great. But the author spends too much time self reflecting about the process of writing, and how painful and difficult it is. I'd estimate nearly half of the books content could be cut by removing such stuff.

Focus on your life in Europe during the wars, that's the interesting stuff, not your inner struggle to write a book.

Also the author is funny and interesting sometimes but he is very self absorbed and at times this becomes irritating. I started to not like him. The book is obviously semi autobiographical. Get over yourself man. Kind of bourgeois.

Also his descriptions of his lovers were tedious. I felt like his romantic success was automatic due to his circumstances, and not particularly admirable or heroic. Made me yawn.

[John Dickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sui generis.

[CMP · Rating 4 out of 5]

louch

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author’s magnum opus, in more or less one work, covering the issues of his time with a longing for the past and a more wonderful future.

[charles t langdale]

Had to stop reading. Need to get on with something else. More than half way thru
this dizzying book. Maybe I will get back to it.
Got back to the book, and again quit. One day, I will finish.

[Melvin McQuade · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh boy, another detailed rape scene for shock value. Why do authors do this crap man.