Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

I Was Jack Mortimer - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 I cannot fathom why the prolific Lernet-Holenia hasn't been translated into English more often.   It seems to me only Baron Blagge (reviewed below), Count Luna and this are available.   He wrote a novel about the Count St Germain - that's obviously of wide interest, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway, I Was Jack Mortimer is very different to Blagge and Luna.   It is a contemporary (1933) satirical take on US gangster thrillers.   In that sense it shares the fantastical tone of Blagge.   Lernet-Holenia gives us a dark farce in which old school mores clash with modern mobsterism.

Cab driver Ferdinand Sponer picks up a fare at the station in Vienna.   The passenger asks to be taken to the Bristol Hotel.   Sponer heads across town.    He hears what he assumes is a truck backfiring.   It occurs to Sponer to ask which Bristol Hotel the man wants, the New Bristol or---   The man doesn't answer.   Because he's been shot dead by someone who must have hopped onto the cab's running board, done the dirty deed, and hopped off again - something only really possible with interwar cars.

Sponer does the decent thing.   He tries to interet the police in the murder, but can't manage to grab their attention.   He therefore decides to dispose of the body and get on with life.   He drives aimlessly around the city, even finds time to pop into a coin-op bar (what happened to those?) and chat up a couple of girls.   Before dropping his passenger into the Danube he has the sense to go through the dead man's papers.   Turns out he's Jack Mortimer, a banker from Chicago.   We subsequently learn more: Mortimer's bank specialises in laundering Mob money; he is or rather was a notorious lady's man.

It occurs to Sponer that he should go on the run, start a more interesting life somewhere else.   Meanwhile, why not make the most of the opportunity to enjoy the high life of Vienna?   He assumes Mortimer's identity and takes Mortimer's room at the right Bristol Hotel.   Also in town are Mortimer's latest conquest and her affronted husband...   The night doesn't turn out anything like Sponer anticipated.

It's all great fun.   The style is certainly modern for the time.   I like the way Sponer's imaginary police interrogations are handled.   I'm not 100% convinced by the translation but I don't speak or read German, so can't really criticise.   The proof reading was astonishingly bad - bloopers on the first page!!?  Get a bloody grip, Pushkin Press!

Beatrice and Her Son - Arthur Schnitzler

Schnitzler was the Viennese novelist of the Freudian era.  Beatrice and Her Son is one of his mature works, published just a year before World War One.  It is is very short (three chapters and less than 100 pages) but very dense and ultimately quite shocking.  Beatrice is the widow of a celebrated actor.  She is probably not yet forty (Schnitzler is far too subtle to specify) and reasonably well off.  Some respectable but slightly dull men of around her own age are showing an interest, now that her mourning period can be considered to be decently done.  But on her summer holiday in the mountains with her son Hugo it is one of Hugo's schoolfriends that she takes to her bed.  Schnitzler is a psychological novelist and sets up many reasons for her scandalous behaviour,  Is it boredom, novelty, risk - or simply revenge?  Revenge because the young man Fritz has hinted that Beatrice's late husband (of whom he does a good impression) had affairs - and/or revenge because Hugo is sleeping with an older woman, a former actress who may or may not have been one of his father's mistresses.  Beatrice only regrets her amour when she overhears the boys talking?  Are they talking - sniggering - about her?  That same night Hugo comes home dejected.  Beatrice guesses that his lover has dispensed with his services.  How can she recover what she and Hugo had before the summer?  The innocent intimacy of mother and son...

This is depth that Schnitzler is able to cram into his novella.  He switches between profound internal monologue and meaningless social chit-chat.  He probes Beatrice's character and motivations so deeply that a single paragraph lasts ten pages.  Yet he never bores, probably because he keeps the novella so short, and he never lectures us with his ideas.  Crucially, he does not judge his character. He merely gives us the symptoms and leaves us to make our own diagnosis.

This book is superb - the novella, which I love, at its best.  I shall definitely be reading more Schnitzler.