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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
- GenresFiction
188 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
70 people want to read
About the author
Gregor von Rezzori
39 books100 followersGregor 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.
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.
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August 14, 2019Ah, Rezzori. The last of the international playboy novelists, consummate Old European, and nowadays largely ignored writer of glittering prose, despite the big-ups from New York Review Books. And in this, one of his last works, he is forced to face the modern world. The Orient Express is both the Orient Express of the protagonist's own memory (after he has turned his back on Europe and become a Wall Street asshole, with many, many years of grumbling to lay on you, the reader), and the heavily marketed "romantic" Orient Express of the nostalgia industry. I don't know why I was as enraptured as I was, but I was.
August 5, 2021
At a mere 181 pages, Gregor von Rezzori’s The Orient-Express bludgeons the reader with relentless erudite pessimism. Want the mental ruminations of a wealthy, jaded Armenian American undergoing a spiritual crisis and on the lam from superficial American consumerism and trite intellectualism--in so much as the protagonist is immersed in it because the women he most often beds are--then The Orient-Express is for you! The cynicism is non-stop and the bon mots drip from every page with a viscosity of wallowing cynicism reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld’s aphorisms. While The Orient-Express is not any easy read, any reader enamored with Thomas Bernhard’s interior monologues will immensely enjoy the ceaseless throbbing negativity of the narrator’s mental perambulations in Part I, with—more often or not—a fixation on the meaningless of existence and the inability of sex to fully mask or compensate glimpses into this void; hence the book is Bernhardesque, but with an obsession on the one topic Bernard scrupulously avoids, sex. While many of the thoughts can be regarded as (mildly) misogynist, or part of an upper-crust male lineage stemming from Saul Bellow’s countless descriptions of his mistresses, the observations are an accurate depiction of an aging man’s thoughts as he undergoes a spiritual crisis. Think Tiresias’s laconic ruminations and disinterestedness in The Waste Land as he observes mediocre sex as a joyless calisthenic hook-up and one can empathize with the tone of the suffering narrator in The Orient-Express. Part II is a bit more plot-driven as the narrator’s descriptions fluctuate between a current train journey on a glitzy recreation of high-end rail travel from Venice to London, all while reminiscing about a similar train journey in his youth. The decay is as evident as Tod in Venice.
The Orient-Express is not for everyone, but rather for a reader versed in Thomas Bernhard’s interior monologues and other European or Old-World male writers trying to reconcile (attempted) procreation or recreational sex with a boast about mistresses and their idiosyncratic annoying qualities. Saul Bellow comes to mind repeatedly. The book is best read slowly, so one can relish and wallow in the utter negativity and pessimism.
Gregor von Rezzori is among the better writers of the latter part of the 20th Century. Thus, his books are rated by me on a tougher curve. If one was to read one book by Rezzori, this would not be it. But, if his other books did not exist, this one would be a five star, not a three.
The Orient-Express is not for everyone, but rather for a reader versed in Thomas Bernhard’s interior monologues and other European or Old-World male writers trying to reconcile (attempted) procreation or recreational sex with a boast about mistresses and their idiosyncratic annoying qualities. Saul Bellow comes to mind repeatedly. The book is best read slowly, so one can relish and wallow in the utter negativity and pessimism.
Gregor von Rezzori is among the better writers of the latter part of the 20th Century. Thus, his books are rated by me on a tougher curve. If one was to read one book by Rezzori, this would not be it. But, if his other books did not exist, this one would be a five star, not a three.
August 23, 2022
Part I was odd – it read like a cut-up blending of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Mr. Sammler’s Planet – but Part II was worth it.
November 23, 2022
Rezzori: Nostalgia and Language (Review of: Anecdotage, Oedipus at Stalingrad, The Hussar/An Ermine in Czernopol, Orient Express)
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
*
Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
*
Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
June 14, 2013
For me he's one of the greatest cultural critics of 20th Century Europe. As an old man nearing the end of his life, he wrote about the decay, comparing the Orient Express of his youth to the late 20th Century:
Nothing of the elegant fin de siecle or the winning Jazz Age was left. What had been resurrected from that time was what had once been heavy, dark, and ominous. Each horror of the present had been in bud then. The curse was an old one: All who survived would suffer humanity's guilt; no pleasure would remain unspoiled, no promise believable. Nothing could be taken easily that had once been take easily; nothing could be indulged now that had once been savored thoughtfully. The brutal man of today had incubated in the innocent boy of that time. Like Narcissus, he had seen his reflection, and it was his fall.
Nothing of the elegant fin de siecle or the winning Jazz Age was left. What had been resurrected from that time was what had once been heavy, dark, and ominous. Each horror of the present had been in bud then. The curse was an old one: All who survived would suffer humanity's guilt; no pleasure would remain unspoiled, no promise believable. Nothing could be taken easily that had once been take easily; nothing could be indulged now that had once been savored thoughtfully. The brutal man of today had incubated in the innocent boy of that time. Like Narcissus, he had seen his reflection, and it was his fall.
April 1, 2022
Nunca pensé en arrepentirme de haber visto una película, pero realmente me arrepiento de haber visto el "expreso oriente" no por que la película haya sido mala o algo así, sino que me sabia el final de este libro antes determinarlo, este libro es especialmente ligero, ademas de ser bastante corto, es muy entretenido de leer, muy emocionante, de un momento a otro ya te ves envuelto en la trama e intentas imaginar que es lo que paso y cuales son sus posibilidades de resolver el caso.
La verdad es que no le tenia muchas expectativas al libro mas que nada por el echo de saber lo que sucedió y como termino todo, pero a problemática del caso Armstrong y como todo se va envolviendo en el, es lo que me llamo la atención, me gusta que mas que venganza por parte de los asesinos, este mas enfocado en prevenir otro, ya que el caso de la niña Armstrong no era el primero y estoy segura que no seria el ultimo.
Por otro lado la tranquilidad con la que el detective Hércules Poirot lleva el caso, no solo resolviéndolo, sino también explicando e intentando que sus compañeros lleguen al mismo resultado que el, ese trabajo en equipo es lo que me "cautivo" a continuar en los momentos mas lentos del libro.
Hablando del final creo que es de lo que mas me ha gustado ya que no se rige por leyes sino que por lo que es verdaderamente correcto por así decirlo.
La verdad es que no le tenia muchas expectativas al libro mas que nada por el echo de saber lo que sucedió y como termino todo, pero a problemática del caso Armstrong y como todo se va envolviendo en el, es lo que me llamo la atención, me gusta que mas que venganza por parte de los asesinos, este mas enfocado en prevenir otro, ya que el caso de la niña Armstrong no era el primero y estoy segura que no seria el ultimo.
Por otro lado la tranquilidad con la que el detective Hércules Poirot lleva el caso, no solo resolviéndolo, sino también explicando e intentando que sus compañeros lleguen al mismo resultado que el, ese trabajo en equipo es lo que me "cautivo" a continuar en los momentos mas lentos del libro.
Hablando del final creo que es de lo que mas me ha gustado ya que no se rige por leyes sino que por lo que es verdaderamente correcto por así decirlo.
November 25, 2020
This looks at the travels and life of the narrator spanning time and space of travels. So much of this describes what led to the journey and places travel in the context of a life.
May 15, 2021
Published in 1992, it's a book that found its way into the house. The story captures the life of a young man and how it evolves over time. What happens in his life are discoveries to read.
July 17, 2025
Mostly just reflections on Europe and other places and people, and particularly how they can let us down or don't.
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March 17, 2010Strangely, almost startlingly, given the excellence of Memoirs of an Anti-semite, this, one of Rezzori's last novels, is not particularly good. The main character is an aging educated European who's spent the last several decades in the States, where he became a successful businessman. He's in Venice, having woken up one day and decided to flee - flee his awful wife, flee his vacuous social circle in New York - and travel around the world until... when? He's been through Asia, and Venice is his first stop in Europe. This is the late 1980s and Venice, being the tacky tourist theme park it is, provides a great platform for the central character (and Rezzori) to ruminate on what a mess Europe's become, how it's taken on so much American kitsch and nonsense and been gutted of its soul. He feels he's no longer a European, but that he never truly became an American (much, as I suspect, condemned wanderer and long time officially "stateless person" Rezzori never felt quite stable and at ease anywhere). He looks at the glossy brochure for the newly remodeled Orient Express, all dolled up to look like some vision from the 1920s, and decides to go for a trip.
But he doesn't actually board the train until over halfway through the book. The first half is a series of short chapters about the character's past and his thoughts on the current state of things (which he views with incredible pessimism). The writing was elegant in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, but here, perhaps because of a different translator, Rezzori seems to have lost his touch. In unnecessarily twisty sentences he unwinds a remarkable dull backstory - the boring frigid wife, the business success, the gatherings of pretentious halfwit friends of his wife at his old home, and a strong preoccupation with all the ladies he's bedded in his day (oh, many many many). Exhausted, overwhelmed with the stupidity of the world, the main character falls back on a number of old jerk-off fantasies, and Rezzori dutifully recounts a number of the significant ones. However, the author seems bored with it all - the writing here consistently rings hollow, his weary character mostly dull. There are some dead-on observations scattered throughout - no writer of Rezzori's caliber is capable of a truly awful book - but they don't save this short novel from becoming tiresome long before the man boards the (inevitably tasteless) train to travel across a continent he no longer recognizes.
But he doesn't actually board the train until over halfway through the book. The first half is a series of short chapters about the character's past and his thoughts on the current state of things (which he views with incredible pessimism). The writing was elegant in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, but here, perhaps because of a different translator, Rezzori seems to have lost his touch. In unnecessarily twisty sentences he unwinds a remarkable dull backstory - the boring frigid wife, the business success, the gatherings of pretentious halfwit friends of his wife at his old home, and a strong preoccupation with all the ladies he's bedded in his day (oh, many many many). Exhausted, overwhelmed with the stupidity of the world, the main character falls back on a number of old jerk-off fantasies, and Rezzori dutifully recounts a number of the significant ones. However, the author seems bored with it all - the writing here consistently rings hollow, his weary character mostly dull. There are some dead-on observations scattered throughout - no writer of Rezzori's caliber is capable of a truly awful book - but they don't save this short novel from becoming tiresome long before the man boards the (inevitably tasteless) train to travel across a continent he no longer recognizes.
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