Octogenarian memoirist and novelist von Rezzori (Oedipus at Stalingrad, 1994, etc.) reflects with wit and bitter irony on the physical and literary terrain of his journey through the 20th century. Born in the Bukovina (formerly part of Austria-Hungary) in 1914, von Rezzori has for the past 80-plus years lived in and spoken the languages of Austria, Romania, Germany, and Italy, where he currently resides. Although this memoir is spurred by a recent hospitalization and by the author's return to post-communist Romania and Germany, it is foremost a work of literary imagination, as the title aptly reflects. Like Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights, which forms the memoir's narrative framework, von Rezzori delights in the act of telling and captivates his audience. Damning the world's ``riffraffization,'' especially the hegemony of the mass media, von Rezzori draws a self-portrait of a man adrift in his own ``unreal'' times: ``A nineteenth-century man of letters on the threshold of the twenty-first.'' A brief visit with his wife to an Indian ashram provides one of many occasions for mirthful reflections on power and religion in the 20th century. Closer to home, the self-confessed curmudgeon (``My own babble bores me to tears'') treats his readers to hilarious and accurate insights, such as this comment on Cologne's Carnival: ``There I observed how hard Germans have to work to organize a bit of whimsical chaos for their own enjoyment.'' His Romania is ``a surrealist country.'' A theme woven through the narrative is von Rezzori's admiration for the late writer Bruce Chatwin, whose work he sets up as a standard he never quite attained himself, although Goethe, Musil, Nabokov, Hofmannsthal, and others, who bob in and out of his reflections, he refers to as ``colleagues.'' This cosmopolite makes no concessions to cultural illiteracy: He presupposed a reader as steeped as he is in the high culture of Central Europe. No riffraff allowed.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-22295-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
