"The unnamed protagonist of this brilliantly written, powerfully affecting novel - by the critically acclaimed author of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear - is Central European by birth but American since World War II: a man shaped in equal measure by the breeding and wealth he inherited and the cynicism he mastered on his own. Suddenly, without warning or farewell, he removes himself from the arena of his daily life: from his work, his wife, his home, all his commitments. An inarticulate impatience has impelled him from New York to San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, Bangkok, "from one laminated plastic luxury hostelry to another," until he arrives in Venice. Now he has purchased a ticket on the newly refurbished Orient-Express - deeply familiar to him from his childhood, from the time when it was the perfect expression of the world it traversed, the world blasted apart by the war." "The legendary train he boards has become a "dream vehicle" that promises to turn back the clock. Yet looking out the window, he can plainly tell from the deformed postwar landscape that the present epoch cannot be escaped so easily. And this glaring contradiction plunges him into reflection on the old Europe and the new, the world into which he was born and what it has become: a banal and unconvincing imitation of its former self. And as his journey progresses - through the night and into the next day, through dramatic and erotic, hilarious and dreadful encounters with other passengers, through the labyrinth of his memory - he is forced to consider whether he too has not become a mere imitation of his former self, truer to the sharp image and impact of his American passport than to his unresolved European inner life." "With all the rich musicality and sparkling irony, the dark brooding and light-filled wit that are his hallmark, Gregor von Rezzori gives us, in The Orient-Express, a piercing psychological study of a man who lives schizophrenically, with pride divided between Old World and New - neither of them whole, neither wholly sustaining. And beyond that, he gives us a profound commentary on a civilization: a once-sublime reality, now doomed to self-parody and extinction."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved