The Snows of Yesteryear

Gregor von Rezzori, who came from an old aristocratic family, was born in Czernowitz, an erstwhile provincial capital of the 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 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 ofThe Snows of Yesteryear. At the heart the book is a series of portraits, variously intimate, humorous, loving, and appalling, of von Rezzori's dysfunctional family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by her 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 him as a boy to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy, the sometime companion of Mark Twain. Telling their stories, von Rezzori tells his own, holding up his early life like a crystal to the light, examining and reexamining its facets and making it shine for us with a prismatic brilliance.

Gregor von Rezzori (1914—1998) studied at the University of Vienna and for a time lived in Bucharest. In Germany, after World War II, he became active as a writer and in radio broadcasting and filmmaking activities. American readers first discovered his writing in English with the appearance of his story “Troth” in The New Yorker. Von Rezzori’s books include Tales from Maghrebinia, Oedipus Triumphs at Stalingrad, The Hussar, The Death of My Brother Abel, and Anecdotage. He lived with his wife in a village near Florence, Italy, until his death. His Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was reissued by NYRB Classics in 2007.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. On occasion he writes under the pen name Benjamin Black.