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The Snows of Yesteryear (New York Review Books Classics)
The Snows of Yesteryear - New York Review Books Classics Author:Gregor Von Rezzori Gregor von Rezzori, who came from an old aristocratic family, was born in Czernowitz, an erstwhile provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine), a place that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of wild human diversity. Growing up after World War I and the ... more »collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.
The book is a series of portraits, variously humorous, loving, and appalling of Rezzori?s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children?s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid Cassandra, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.« less