An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Gregor Von Rezzori; Philip Boehm; Daniel Kehlmann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590173414 ISBN 13: 9781590173411

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2012

Synopsis

"The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol," Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author's childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir The Snows of Yesteryear and the trickily titled novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. In The Ermine of Czernopol, Rezzori summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism. The novel, ostensibly centered on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality, gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment, but in which, for all that, "laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals."

About this title

Review:

Any reader of European literature who has not read Gregor von Rezzori has commited the unthinkable. This is the rare writer who writes with unmatched beauty and skill while celebrating the joys of life.

(Gary Shteyngart)

This wonderful book--literally, a book full of wonders--which lived for too long in shadow, has been brought fully to light by Philip Boehm's lustrous new translation. An Ermine of Czernopol may at last take its place on the shelf alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

(John Banville)

It is time that it now took its rightful place among the classics of 20th-century literature.

(Spectator)

Demonstrates how great writing can emerge from a mishmash of nationalities, relitions, cultures, political philosophies and sexual habits

(Jewish Chronicle)

Rezzori has a distinctively individual voice, and readers fascinated by Eastern Europe between Habsburg and Hitler will be well served by Philip Boehm's spirited translation of his rich, often lush prose.

(TLS)

About the Author:

Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one "spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest." After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot's Guide to German Society and Ein Hermelin in Tschernopol (to be published by NYRB Classics as Ermine). From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (published by NYRB Classics), and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography.

Philip Boehm is the author of numerous translations from Polish and German, including works by Franz Kafka, Ida Fink, and Christoph Hein.

Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages. Awards his work has received include the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin. His most recent book to be translated into English is Fame.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1590173414
• ISBN 13: 9781590173411
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392