The Orient Express (Vintage International)

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable von Rezzori
Review: His obituary rang no bells. Von Rezzori did seem to have an intriguing background, and there was nothing on my bed table, so I decided to locate this novel and give it a try. Frankly, I am more of a non-fiction reader, so I began with low expectations.

Wow! Pithy, unusual and magnificent. I took a leisurely pace, like the train in the title, and found myself enthralled. Perhaps understatement works better, and is more credible. Neverthless, this is the finest work of modern fiction I have had the supreme pleasure to read. And two more of von Rezzori's works also captivated me. Try one!

Rating:
Summary: Von Rezzori - sadly underrated
Review: The Kirkus reviewer of this book missed the point--calling Von Rezzori's prose "overwritten" is a bit like calling Pollock's painting "busy." He is a writer very conscious of the excesses of his style and in the post-Joycean era might argue that reasonableness in contemporary literature is an anachronism. Unlike the last reviewer, though, I found "The Orient-Express" middling Von Rezzori. Far better, for different reasons, are "Oedipus at Stalingrad" and "The Death of My Brother Abel"--now scandalously out of print, at least in this country. Personally I believe Von Rezzori superior to both Thomas Mann and Robert Musil as a European novelist of ideas--but I won't take the space to justify that assessment here.