A New York Review Books Original<br><br>&#8220;The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol,&#8221; Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author&#8217;s childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir <i>The Snows of Yesteryear </i>and the trickily titled novel <i>Memoirs of an Anti-Semite</i>. In <i>The Ermine of Czernopol</i>, Rezzori summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism. The novel, ostensibly centered on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality, gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears&#8212;a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment, but in which, for all that, &#8220;laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals.&#8221;<br><br>This first complete English translation of <i>The Ermine of Czernopol </i>makes a masterpiece of postwar literature available to American readers.