Count Luna
By (Author) Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Translated by Jane B. Greene
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
2nd July 2024
28th March 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Second World War fiction
Fiction in translation
Narrative theme: Interior life
833.912
Paperback
160
Width 130mm, Height 198mm, Spine 10mm
126g
A deliciously deranged thriller about supernatural vengeance and postwar guilt, by one of Austria's most celebrated writers Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful - but in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour Count Luna to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to seize his land, Jessiersky can't shake the feeling that Count Luna blames him - and, after the war ends, that Count Luna will have his revenge. So begins a wild, weird and witty cat-and-mouse chase through windswept moors, shadow-filled houses and, eventually, the catacombs of Rome, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself- who is Count Luna Where is he hiding And will he stop at nothing - not even the edges of the plausible and canny - to exact his bloody venegance
A book so astonishing that I immediately re-read it, fearful it might disappear -- Patti Smith
Daunting panache, fast-moving, cleverly convoluted, terrific * Irish Times *
In Count Luna, an industrialist inadvertently responsible for sending a man to a concentration camp feels certain that the fellow survived the war and is mounting a shadowy campaign of revenge. Like Kafka [...] Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams into the texture of what happens next with exquisitely imagined detail * Chicago Tribune *
Alexander Lernet-Holenia (Author) Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protege of Rainer Maria Rilke. During his life he wrote poetry, novels, plays and was a successful screenwriter. His books were included on the first Nazi blacklist and subsequently burned, but after the end of the Second World War, he again became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life. Jane B. Greene (Translator) Jane B. Greene was a translator best known for her translations of Count Luna by Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910.