The Snows of Yesteryear

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The Snows of Yesteryear is a masterpiece in that rare genre that might be classed as incidental autobiography. The story the book has to tell, of the formation of a soul and a sensibility, is slyly concealed within the interstices of a set of other stories, of other lives, other pasts. In its method, which seems not a method at all, it resembles those other two great magically dissembling memoirs of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Harold Nicolson’s Some People. Rezzori’s style is less beadily precious and certainly less prolix than Nabokov’s, and his psychological insights run deeper than Nicolson’s, but all three writers share the same poise and elegance, the same drily critical eye and, delightfully, the same faintly absurdist wit. As Rezzori writes, “to recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world."

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