An Ermine in Czernopol [Paperback]

An NYRB Classics Original

Set just after World War I,An Ermine in Czernopolcenters on the tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, determined to defend the virtue of his cheating sister-in-law at any cost. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, engaging us in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears—a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and heartbreaking disappointment, in which, however, “laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals.”

.. Gregor von Rezzori's mid-20th-century masterpiece….has been likened by the novelist John Banville to bothThe Tin DrumandOne Hundred Years of Solitude, although a more instructive comparison might be to the European novels of Vladimir Nabokov…in a luminous new translation by Philip Boehm… - John Wray,The New York Times Book Review

The last great remembrancer of a region that has vanished from the map and mind of Europe. --Michael Ignatieff,The New York Review of Books

This wonderful book--literally, a book full of wonders--which lived for too long in shadow, has been brought fully to light by Philip Boehm's lustrous new translation.An Ermine of Czernopol may at last take its place on the shelf alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude. -- John Banville

“The novelist and memoirist Gregor von Rezzori was one of the last and most redoubtable links with a Mid-to-Eastern European world, rich in history and character, complex in nationality and ethnic allegiance, that has gone forever, devoured or dispersed through successive waves of rapaciously competitive nationalism…von Rezzori’s flair for language which hlƒ½