It was a mixed blessing that Grisha’s nostalgia—rather, his extreme alternation, or juxtaposition, of warm sentiment and violent incident—was most appreciated in America, which perhaps also appreciated how much he relished denigrating America, calling it stupid, crass, incurious, and puritanical. He enjoyed blaming the fact that he had to support himself with hackwork on the Americanization of postwar European culture; but then he always had a sly sadist’s understanding of the American intellectual’s appetite for masochism (perhaps because it was appropriated from the émigré Jewish intellectual’s appetite for masochism). Almost all of his other books were set in memory, but this book—or books—is about memory, how it’s made and remade, sequelized and enkitsched; how memory, as it passes out of the family, out of the community, out of the nation, and then finally out of the age, inevitably is generalized and broadened for mass consumption. He was a keen believer that the larger the audience for something, the dumber that something becomes—and the more ideologically correct it becomes too. Whether we believe that dictum or not, we keep proving it truer and truer in the third millennium of Christ—with our partisan “news” as much as with our anti-literary “media properties,” and especially with our online interactions.

Abel and Cain is of a different tradition. It’s one of those vast masterpieces for the chosen few, like Journey to the End of the Night and Gravity’s Rainbow. Von Rezzori is a Céline with a conscience. He’s a Pynchon who has outgrown the movies.

—JOSHUA COHEN

THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL

Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Translation revised by Marshall Yarbrough

For whom else but you!

I RAN AFTER him. I caught up with him on the stairs. He turned to me and saw my face as I asked him, “You’re coming back for sure? You promise?” He kissed me very tenderly on the forehead and on the eyes and on the mouth and took my hands and kissed one and then the other, saying, “I swear to you, my darling, of course I’m coming back.” “Why don’t you take me along right now?” I asked. “I can come with you right now.” “Like that—naked as a jaybird?” he asked and kissed my breast. (I only had a towel wrapped around me.) I said, “I’ll run and get dressed.” I wanted him to come back to the room with me. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. He was very sweet with me. He took my face in both his hands and pulled it close to his—and then tapped his finger on my nose. “Hurry up!” I ran back to the room to get dressed.

When he first tried to pick me up, I wanted to turn my back on him. A guy like him means trouble. Well into his forties and suspiciously elegant, with no real money behind him. But I’d had a bad day: two johns in the morning and then no one else until five. It was foggy all day. I noticed right off he’d been drinking, and he said, “You’re very beautiful, my pet. We’re going to have a good time. But would you mind waiting for one minute? I want to get an Alka-Seltzer at the drugstore. I’ve had quite a bit to drink and I haven’t eaten all day.” I thought to myself, Whatever you get at the drugstore, you can go fuck your mother with it, and your little sister too. But then I only walked a couple of steps away from him, up to the streetlamp and no farther, and I was too lazy to signal to Ginette, who probably was only half a block away in the fog. (She’d been standing out there all day long too.) Five minutes later, he was back, Alka-Seltzer in hand. (Whatever you really got at the drugstore, you can shove it up your mother’s ass, I thought.) “Shall we go?” he said. “Or do you have other plans?”