And Then We Moved to Rossenarra

And Then We Moved to Rossenarra: or, The Art of Emigrating is a memoir by the American political novelist Richard Condon, published by Dial Press in 1973. A native of New York City whose early career had mostly been that of a press agent for various Hollywood studios, Condon took up writing relatively late in life but then became both profilic and famous; today he is most remembered for his 1960 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate and for his four later novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi.

And Then We Moved to Rossenarra is a mostly light-hearted and occasionally humorous account of his family's many moves and residences throughout Europe and Mexico in the decades preceeding the publication of the memoir. Much of it is devoted to his purchase and excruciatingly long and expensive restoration of a large Irish country house called Rossenarra, to the point where many of the incidents about incompetent plumbers, electricians, and other tradesmen, all directed by a fictional capo invented by Condon as a humorous device, become, by the end of a 300-page book, increasingly tedious. Throughout the book, however, which is presented in a non-chronological manner, there are occasionally interesting asides and anecdotes about some of Condon's books, particularly his first one, The Oldest Confession, and his most famous one, The Manchurian Candidate. In contrast to most of the book, which is distinctly flip in manner, some of Condon's comments in Chapter 19 about the supposed similarities between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his The Manchurian Candidate, which had been published three years before the murder, are both heart-felt and bitter in their assessment of the American character.

As a result of his first few novels, all of them strikingly original, Condon had become not only famous, with reviews in all the major media such as The New York Times,, Time, and Newsweek, but also something of a literary cult figure. By the time Rossenarra was published, however, his reputation had slipped so much that its only mention in any of these three outlets was a notice of its appearance in "A Listing of Recently Published Books" in the New York Times of May 30, 1973.

References

And Then We Moved to Rossenarra: or, The Art of Emigrating, by Richard Condon, Dial Press, New York, 1973