Books of The Times; Memory Used as Link Not to Past but Future

Published: October 09, 1992

The Orient Express By Gregor von Rezzori Translated by David Cameron Palastanga. 181 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $21.

Aram, the protagonist of Gregor von Rezzori's new novel, has the "finely chiseled, darkly shaded adolescent face" of the young Marcel Proust, and his story, like "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," is concerned with the search for lost time. As in Proust's masterpiece, the hero is given to involuntary assaults of memory: like Marcel, he recalls his youthful idealized love for a young girl and his subsequent and more worldly pursuits of other women; and like Marcel, he tries to come to terms with these earlier romances during a trip to Venice.

For Aram, though, these privileged moments of memory do not bring redemption; they do not even serve to recapture the past. Rather, they remind him of the yawning chasm between time past and time present and of the inexorable march we must all make toward old age and extinction.

"The Orient Express," translated by David Cameron Palastanga from the German, is written in the same lavishly detailed prose that Mr. von Rezzori used to such dazzling effect in his two works of fictionalized autobiography, "Memoirs of an Anti-Semite" (1981) and "The Snows of Yesteryear" (1989). This volume evinces other similarities to those earlier works as well: namely, an ability to conjure up the vanished world of Central Europe that existed between the wars and a determination to draw parallels between the dissolution of that world and the hero's own anguished journey from childhood innocence into worldly sophistication.

Aram, we quickly learn, was born into an enormously wealthy family that lived in the area of the Austro-Hungarian empire that later became part of Romania. The son of an English mother and an Armenian father, he grew up conflicted about race and class, feeling both envy and contempt toward his pale-skinned, fair-haired classmates at school in Britain.

Eventually Aram moves to the United States, where he enlarges his already considerable family fortune through a series of shrewd business transactions. He marries a cool blond socialite named Linda and develops a longstanding sexual liaison with a perky beauty-shop operator named Denise. His workdays are spent in the company of Manhattan power brokers, his weekends amid the fashionable partygoers of Southampton.

Then one day Aram inexplicably decides to toss it all away. From New York, he flies to San Francisco and on to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Venice. He has missed the real point in living, he thinks, and while he wishes he had done it earlier, he feels he must finally throw off "the bonds of convention" and reassess his life.

By the time we meet him, Aram is sunk in a deep, suicidal gloom. He is sick and tired of his wife's social pretensions, her chilliness in bed, her snobbish, moralizing friends. He is equally fed up with his mistress's suffocating displays of affection and her embarrassing willingness to grovel. Watching the rich people at his hotel in Venice, he is nauseated by their self-satisfied love of money. Wandering through the city's magnificent museums, he is repulsed by the phoniness of people who profess to worship culture. Life, he decides, has no meaning or purpose: people are "like a plague of mites, worshiping many gods but serving only the Great Mammon."