商品簡介
Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volume
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.
作者簡介
Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During World War II, he worked as a radio broadcaster in Berlin and published his first novel. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films. Among his best-known work is the Bukovina Trilogy--Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, An Ermine in Czernopol, and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear--all of which are published by NYRB Classics.
David Dollenmayer has translated works by Rolf Bauerdick, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Walser, and many others. Dollenmayer translated Cain for Abel and Cain.
Joachim Neugroschel (1938-2011) was a translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish literature. He also published poetry and translated and edited multiple anthologies of Yiddish literature. Neugroschel translated an earlier edition of My Brother Abel, which was then revised for Abel and Cain. He also translated Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite for NYRB Classics.
Marshall Yarborough is a translator of German literature and a writer. He has revised Joachim Neugroschel's original translation of My Brother Abel for Abel and Cain.
Joshua Cohen is a novelist and short story writer. His works include the novels Witz and Book of Numbers.
