Just out of the hospital and just short of celebrating his eightieth birthday, Gregor von Rezzori begins this intensely beautiful and astringently witty memoir as he sets out on a trip that will take him back to the landscapes of his childhood and youth and forward to new encounters with old demons.

In Romania, where he was born and where the aftershocks of the 1989 uprising against corrupt Communism still shudder through the land, Rezzori broods on the nature of a people's devotion to tyrants who enslave them, and on the conflicting oddities in revisiting a homeland after half a century.

In Germany - in Hamburg, Berlin, and Cologne, whose dark Carnival revelries he "covers" as a television commentator - Rezzori continues this theme; over decades, he has had ample opportunity to bear witness to the culture of Germany, whose language is as expressive and alluring as its political history is dangerously harsh. And in Pondicherry, India, where he visits the Sri Aurobindo Society, he has further hilarious cause to muse on the peculiar eagerness with which we worship new and old gods.

In a finale that is a superbly imagined encounter with a personage whose very name evokes a Europe that is gone forever - Otto von Hapsburg - Rezzori is able to "make his case" in a "summation" of his own views on the culture and continent which he and the Prince share.

Above all, in a daring literary tour de force of wonderfully self-deprecating wit, he suggests the underlying impulses of his writing life: his search for some kind of truth, some kind of perfection, in a world despoiled by war and ill will.