Kusniewicz, Andrzej

New York. 1980. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. Remainder Mark on Bottom Edge. 0151472718. Translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska. 197 pages. hardcover. Cover: Krystyna Skalski. keywords: Literature Translated Poland Eastern Europe . FROM THE PUBLISHER - This is a masterly rich novel of the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire, of the decay of a civilization as reflected in the life of a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. It is the story of Emil, a delicate product of the privileged bourgeois society of Vienna at the turn of the century. Emil, a refined poet, an esthete with sadomasochistic tendencies, is entangled in an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Elizabeth, a capricious dominating creature, the essence of the poisonous child/woman. Kusniewicz unravels the perverse and erotic life of Emil - Emil, a blond, angelic child, victim and willing participant in Elizabeth's vicious games; Emil, an anemic schoolboy reading Nietzsche, deliberating suicide and murder; Emil, a pious Catholic tormented by his passion for his sister, condemned to eternal damnation. As a backdrop to the accelerating psychological drama of Emil and Elizabeth, the setting shifts from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, to the mobilization of the Imperial Sicilian Lancers, to their brawling and treachery in a Hungarian garrison town, to the mysterious death of a young gypsy prostitute, strangled by her necklace of stolen corals strung On a wire. The continuous thread in this magnificent novel is Kusniewicz's vision of the intricate and rigid web of the past, of the subtle and far-reaching imperatives of cause and effect. inventory #32697 ISBN: 0151472718.