The Orient-Express - Softcover

The narrator of The Orient-Express, a wealthy tycoon born in Central Europe, suddenly runs from his home, his wife, his job, his commitments. In Venice the casual reading of a brochure leads to a trip on the legendary Orient-Express - familiar to him as a boy, it is now a perfect expression of the European civilisation lost with the war. As he journeys through the night, he sees how Europe has become a mere imitation of itself. Has he too become a mere imitation of himself? With sparkling irony, dark brooding and light wit, Gregor von Rezzori gives us a superb pyschological study and erotic drama that is also a profound commentary on a civilisation and its extinction.

Gregor von Rezzori was born in the Bukovina in 1914. He studied at the University of Vienna and for a time lived in Bucharest. In West Germany after World War II he became active as a writer and in radio broadcasting and film-making. His other books inlcude Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, described by D M Thomas as 'a brilliant novel in which the essential history of our epoch, both its light and its deepening shadows, can be read', and his portraits for an autobiography, The Snows of Yesteryear. Gregor von Rezzori died in 1998.