Word: ands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nostalgia is what we like today: warm, a bit muzzy, with lots of generalizing dips back into a past full of evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must...
American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation...
Rezzori was the son of a minor aristocratic family living on the outer fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous...
An extraordinary set they were. His Carpathian peasant nurse, Cassandra, part witch and part illiterate earth mother, was given to romping naked with the pack of family dogs -- "a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane," whose fierce nurturing exuberance was in utmost contrast to the coddling anxieties of a...
Strong material, then; and Rezzori follows this family labyrinth back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist...