If you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe Gregor von Rezzori's Abel and Cain in three sentences, this is what I would answer: Murder. Murder. Murder. First-, second-, and third-degree: premeditated, unpremeditated, involuntary. Fratricide, sororicide, parricide. Genocide, historicide, deicide.
Every -cide 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.
At a Paris café on the eve of 1968, 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, abridgment, encapsulation, truncation, 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 scriptwriting hackwork, or a survival-identity assumed during wartime. (Aristides was an Athenian statesman. Subicz was the name of an ancient ruling house of Dalmatia, which spanned present-day Croatia and Bosnia.)
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