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.ABEL AND CAIN by Gregor von RezzoriNYRB Classics, 880 pp., $24.95 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 …read more
Source: The New Republic
