The Snows of Yesteryear

Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Gregor Von Rezzori lived in a world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear. At the heart the book is a series of portraits of von Rezzori’s dysfunctional family: his hysterical and histrionic mother; his father, a flinty reactionary; 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.