In fact, it is precisely this tone of levity that is the very substance of the book’s gravity. If “1938” did not have its deadly ring in our ears — if we did not know perfectly well what was to take place in, for example, “1941,” we might find the tone painfully callous, or contemptible, but not exactly shocking. As it is, though, we are shaken out of our automatic and sanitized a postiori position on past crimes — that is, crimes in which we ourselves were not involved.
It is partly the narrator’s engaging self-mockery that prevents us from being able to dismiss him outright as nothing more than an amazingly frivolous lout, and it is partly the transfixing spectacle of the various mental collisions he experiences in front of us. He takes the road of least resistance in almost every situation, but his weak character (which occasions much head-shaking on the part of his clownishly reactionary relatives) is no guarantee that he’ll always have a good time; the same acuity that enables him to distort or camouflage the evidence in front of his eyes functions also as almost an opponent, allowing highly unwelcome insights to dismantle his equanimity.
But just who is this narrator and who is he to us? The first four of the book’s five segments, or stories, are narrated in the first person. The “I” that runs through these four sections grows older but is generally consistent, exhibiting a number of identical attitudes, many of them repugnant, and traits, many of them regrettable, in addition, always, to a vanquishing charm and an enchanting verbal panache. This “I” seems always to have been born around 1914 in the Bukovina and to have spent significant portions of time in Vienna, where he has family, and also in Berlin and Bucharest. And those of us who are at all familiar with Rezzori’s biography are bound to recognize in this the general outline of his life.
Any first-person narrator’s claim borrows from the unassailability of autobiography — often very effectively so, even though we know that it is only a conceit designed to do just that. And to present a narrator, as Rezzori does, whose name is primarily, confidently “I,” is to strike a pact with the reader — to put the reader into a special, intimate, engaged position vis-à-vis the narrator, who seems to be saying something like, “I’m sharing a confidence with you, one that’s important to me. It might be private, really, and embarrassing, but I’m not so ashamed that I can’t tell you.” The corollary is, of course, “Let’s pretend this is me I’m talking about.” And in the case of this book, in which some of the narrators are called “Gregor” and some of their experiences resemble the author’s, there’s the further, teasing, suggestion, “Who’s to say it isn’t?”
But there are little reminders throughout — even to those unfamiliar with particulars of Rezzori’s life that diverge significantly from his narrators’—that what we’re reading is not autobiography. Though we’re content to assume that the personal history of one section’s narrator informs the thinking of the narrators of the other sections, the sections clearly aren’t designed to be particularly cohesive. The foot-loose narrator of the harrowing “Löwinger’s Rooming House” tells us, following his casual, pointless betrayal of a fellow lodger, “After nearly four years of the Balkans I’d had my fill and felt homesick for Vienna. I arrived there just in time for March 1938.” Yet just a few pages later, it’s a ridiculous love affair that brings the narrator of “Troth” to Romania and then to Vienna in February 1938.
Were these passages written on the day the writer interrupted his work to answer the phone? Was the editor asleep? Obviously not; this is fiction we’re reading, and its purposes are the insights and illuminations of which fiction and only fiction is capable. Nor is this contradiction of circumstances a mistake in a novel. “Löwinger’s Rooming House” and “Troth” are two distinct narratives, both of which require their protagonist to be in Vienna for the prelude to Anschluss, but each of which is working to a different end.
Also reminding us that fiction is what we’re reading is the sheer artistry, conspicuously, even perhaps suspiciously so, in the forefront, of both structure and language. Is that display designed, we might ask, not only to thrill and delight, which it does, but also to bedazzle, to seduce — actually to distract? Or designed, rather, to make us note what it is to be seduced, bedazzled, and distracted? How will the author manage to land on his feet at the end of this whirling arabesque of a sentence? What outlandish sight will he unveil next? Look over there! There, at the party, the lovers, the hilarious passersby, not over here, where the train is being loaded up with Jews for its journey east.
But what would an author, who is so clearly devoted to verisimilitude, gain from pointing out to us, now and again, that it is fiction rather than strict autobiography we’re reading? Once the question is asked, the answer seems obvious: when we’re aware of reading fiction, rather than memoir or autobiography, we’re aware that the book is not about the singular experience of the author; the focus, the effort, the purpose lie elsewhere.
Each of Rezzori’s disarming, capering, mischievous raconteurs puts an arm around us as he gambols at our side, turning our attention to this or that, and we can’t help but read as a companion — or, one might say, as an accomplice; the charm is collusive; we can hardly pretend we’re not party to his confidences! Nor can we pretend we don’t understand his states of mind. What was so clear in hindsight, before we began the book — the step-by-step progress toward inevitable catastrophe — is obscured by the vital presentness of Rezzori’s urgent and intimate narration.
The unexpected postwar narrator of the anguished, subtle, final section, “Pravda,” with its inconclusive paragraphs and its unstable balancings of rage and resignation, is not “I” but “he.” And the sensation of finding ourselves at a remove, alienated from prior convictions, habits, milieus, is deeply unsettling. Who is this “he,” this other, whom life has made us? Where did we split off from ourselves, and what happened to our firm reliance on our received view of things? “The artful feat of always holding up a new possibility of himself, a fiction of himself, and the knack, the balletic skill, of eluding reality, withdrawing the fiction at the last instant before colliding with reality — those were talents no one could emulate,” the protagonist, “he,” observes.
One of the extraordinary capacities of fiction is its amenability to rendering conditions of self-deception, to enable us to read with a sort of double brain; we can be instructed to look at something and look away from it simultaneously. Rezzori has provided us with a detailed examination of how the brain works when it’s getting itself to think things that are advantageous to the person in whom it’s housed and of how the brain works when it’s getting itself not to think things disadvantageous to that person. And he has traced the mental consequences of those mental achievements, too: What happens when one’s interests come to conflict, as in the event of divided loyalties and affections? What happens when reality runs out of room for one’s system of beliefs and sense of oneself?
The relationships between these stories is one of a development of a consciousness, a consciousness that belongs to many people, to a world that has sustained seizures of destruction, that is waking from delusional dreams of glory and heroism to find itself grotesquely maimed, and drenched with blood.
It is perhaps in this retrospective section, “Pravda,” that we become more uncomfortably aware of the future than the past. We recall from the earlier sections specious discussions, telling instances of misdirected focus, expressions of breathtaking shortsightedness. The narrator of “Troth” who has come to Vienna for a tryst, as it happens on the night of Anschluss, stands at the window the next morning with his lover