The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rezzori, Gregor von, author. | Cohen, Joshua, 1980– writer of introduction.

Title: Abel and Cain / Gregor von Rezzori ; introduction by Joshua Cohen ; translated by David Dollenmayer ; translated by Joachim Neugroschel ; translated by Marshall Yarbrough.

Other titles: Cain. English.

Description: New York : NYRB Classics, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029642 (print) | LCCN 2018031953 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373263 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373256 (paperback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

Classification: LCC PT2635.E98 (ebook) | LCC PT2635.E98 A64 2019 (print) | DDC 833/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029642

ISBN 978-1-68137-326-3

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

CONTENTS

Introduction

THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL

CAIN: THE LAST MANUSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION

1

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.

First-, second-, third-degree: premeditated, unpremeditated, involuntary.

Fratricide, sororicide, parricide.

Genocide, historicide, deicide.

Every cide, all the violence of the ides, suffuses every aspect of this grimly remarkable book, from its title that memorializes the victim and perpetrator of the first murder on biblical record, to its recurrent evocations of Nazi death camps and German cities under Allied bombardment. Then there are the book’s myriad less literal killings, its Gedankenmorde or “thought murders,” such as: the “murder” committed by writers when they write their family and friends into their books, and the “murder” of writers and books committed by their agents, editors, publishers, and introducers . . .

Not to forget the “murder” of books by their screen adaptations, and the “murder” of literature itself by film and television . . .

I could go on and on, but Gregor von Rezzori already has in this massive novel that might be two novels that contradict each other so brutally and so brilliantly that summarizing them should be a crime—or maybe it’s just my punishment for loving them.

An attempt at summary, come to think of it, is what triggers the very existence of these pages:

At a Paris café on the eve of 1968, the annus counterculturis, a Galician Jew turned American literary agent named Brodny meets an initially unnamed German-language novelist and asks him for “his story,” which the novelist takes to mean “the story of his life,” but told in the Hollywood style: short enough to be sketched on a napkin, quick enough to be pitched in an elevator.

In the film business, the suggestively psychoanalytic term for this type of synopsis is a “treatment,” and the writer is resistant, to say the least.

Meanwhile, the agent’s not asking anymore, he’s yelling, “Tell me the story in three sentences!”

The writer is so insulted by this demand for abbreviation, abridgement, encapsulation, etc., that he ditches the agent, dashes off to his hotel, and, forgetting his writer’s block, dashes off this book, or books—in which he calls himself “Aristides Subicz,” though it’s unclear whether that name is his “real” name, or a pseudonym assumed for his script-writing hackwork, or a survival identity assumed during wartime.