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Title: 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.
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