Baron Bagge - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Lernet-Holenia is a key figure in Twentieth Century Austrian literature, badly underpublished in English translation.   I looked on the British Library catalogue and only came up with four of his works in English.   I cannot understand this.   I jumped at the chance when I saw Count Luna was newly added to Penguin Modern Classics and that Baron Blagge had been republished to keep it company.   Waterstones only had Blagge but I was fine with that.

Blagge is a short novella or long short story.   The similarities with the stories of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen are everywhere.   Upper class characters who find themselves overwhelmed by a vaguely supernatural situation.   Blagge is a junior officer in Count Gondola Dragoons.   In 1915 they find themselves in pursuit of the Russians in the Carpathian mountains.   There is a battle on a bridge.   The dragoons found themselves in the village of Nagy-Mihaly where Bagge is greeted by the beautiful Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, daughter of the best friend of Bagge's mother.   The mothers have long conspired to marry their children, but they have never met.   Yet Charlotte somehow knew that Bagge was coming today.   It's very odd.

And the oddness is the beauty of the book.   It is beautifully written and exactly the right length to do the story justice.  The characters are wonderfully realised, especially the supporting cast - Bagge's touchy superior Semler, and Charlotte's father with his damp handlebar moustache.  I absolutely adored it.   Exactly the sort of book I am constantly on the lookout for.   I must have more.

Babette's Feast - Isak Dinesen

 Originally published in 1958 when Blixen/Dinesen was 73, this is one of her last collections whereas Seven Gothic Tales (reviewed below) was one of her first.  There is absolutely no difference in quality.  As with the Gothic Tales, there is a common theme.  Originally the title was Anecdotes of Destiny, which is exactly what they are, but I fully understand why Penguin have renamed the book.

There are five stories, only three of them substantial.  'Diver' and 'The Ring' really are just anecdotes, albeit excellent ones.  The substantial works are 'Babette's Feast', 'Tempests', and 'The Immortal Story'.  I was absorbed by them all.  In theory, I suppose, I should with my background (theatre) I should prefer 'Tempests', especially given that one of the few Shakespeare plays that still enthuses me is The Tempest.  Actually, though, my favourite was 'The Immortal Story.'   I think it was its oddness - a wealthy English tea merchant in Canton decides to re-enact a modern myth - and its circularity.  I have a theory that the tying up of narrative ends is one of Dinesen's defining traits.  And we must remember the original title.  These events, even the twists and turns of the plot, were all pre-ordained.

I continue to be amazed how the same person can write stories like these and Out of Africa.  I tell myself it is the ghastly, unwatchable film of the latter that puts me off and the book might be perfectly acceptable.  I'm still not going to read it.  I'm tempted to try The Angelic Avengers next.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead - Danilo Kis

Danilo Kis (1935-1989) was a Yugoslavian expat, living and working in France. He wrote some novels but is perhaps better remembered for his short stories (or pocket-sized novels, as he called them) of which this, from 1983, was his final collection.

Kis's style deliberately reminds us of Borges but I also found links with Umberto Eco (whose Prague Cemetary is strongly reminiscent of Kis's 'The Book of King and Fools') and Isak Dinesen (very much so in an off-beam love story like 'Last Respects'). He is elusive and goes to considerable lengths to disguise fiction as fact. The key story here is presumably 'The Encylcopedia of the Dead' itself, which is what it says it is - a woman looks up her father in the huge encyclopedia of everyone who has not been recorded elsewhere. Actually I wanted the story to go further - so that should you ever be mentioned in any other written record (such as a short story or a memoir) you are automatically deleted from the encyclopedia of unknowns. Perhaps that is easier to envisage in the age of the internet. Kis's story is an uncomfortable reminder how far archival records have come in just 35 years. I liked 'The Book of Kings and Fools' even more, largely because  I had read and enjoyed Prague Cemetery so recently.


My favourite over all, though, is 'Simon Magus', the gnostic story of the rival messiah who fell spectacularly foul of Christ's disciples. This is exactly the sort of story I love to read and write.


I am not the biggest fan of introductions. Here, however, the introduction is by Mark Thompson, who is Kis's biographer, and I feel the stories would have been harder to get into without it.

Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Karen Blixen, best known, I suppose, for Out of Africa, which was ruined for many of us by the stultifying movie with Streep and Redford. Seven Gothic Tales was her first book, written in English and published in 1934 when she was nudging 40.


The term 'gothic' has come to be synonymous with horror, but Dinesen reminds us that it need not be so. These tales are not horror but they are complex, fantastical, and very dark. Gothic, for Blixen, hovers on the boundary between fantasy and madness. They take as their starting point a sort of northern European upper class respectability and then, piece by piece, reveal the transgressive passions lurking beneath.


'The Roads Round Pisa' hinges on cross dressing, "The Old Chevalier" still fantasizes about the free-spirited woman he met in Paris in his youth, the unbridled sex they enjoyed together in the age of crinolines and corsets. "The Monkey" has a strong tint of voyeurism. Survivors of "The Deluge at Norderney" confide their dark and shameful secrets as they wait to be rescued from the flood. Sisters n "The Supper at Elsinore" maintain the fiction that they are still the local belles they were in youth. "The Dreamers" begins as a tale told on an Arab dhow off Zanzibar but becomes a trans-European quest for a prima donna who has lost her voice in a deliberate fire. And the final, shortest of the tales, "The Poet" begins with charity and goodwill before turning to passion and ultimately murder.


The tales are all very long - "The Dreamers" is nearly 90 pages and even "The Poet" is more than 50. They are tales within tales, layers within layers, and even on occasion refer to other tales within the septet. The writing is simply magnificent. Blixen spoke several languages but the fact that English was not her first means that, like Conrad, she creates new and often startling phrases that play up the falseness of the poses struck by her outwardly respectable protagonists. I see influences - Conrad, obviously, and stars of the original gothic craze like Beckford and Mrs Radcliffe; and of course you cannot think of a gothicmonkey without thinking of le Fanu and "Green Tea"- but even so the result is something so original that I cannot think of a comparison.


Sheer brilliance.