Baron Bagge Count Luna (Eridanos Press Library) - Softcover

The thin line between life and death, between reality and fantasy, is skillfully explored in these two short novels by Austrian Alexander Lernet-Holenia. In Baron Bagge, an apparently misguided cavalry attack serves as a starting point for a dreamlike journey that examines the mythological belief in a nine-day transitional period Erom one world to another after death. In this compelling account of the journey that marks the passage to the afterlife, Lemet-Holenia carefully constructs a framework of distorted time to display a philosophy grounded in the Romantic tradition. As his dream bride explains: "Every one of us has only himself to deal with; no one can help another person, and every individual, I feel, is alone, utterly alone.... We are always only pretexts for one another, nothing more." This sense of isolation carries over into the Baron's return to the real world, leaving him unsure of the meaning of life as well as that of death. In Count Luna, written much later in his career, LernetHolenia displays even greater control of his craft. Ile story opens with a man disappearing into the catacombs of Rome, and the novel recreates the events leading up to this curious occurrence. Through simple negligence the industrialist Alexander Jessiersky is responsible for Count Luna's condemnation to a concentration camp; recognizing his guilt, Jessiersky devotes his life to the search for a means to atone for his crime. In a classic tale of paranoia, Jessiersky becomes obsessed with his victim to the point of committing a series of crimes in order to exonerate himself. As a writer, Alexander Lemet-Holenia combines the best of the classic tradition in literature with a surprisingly contemporary understanding of structure and language. Passages in Count Luna tracing lineage and metaphorical relationships are brilliant; Lemet-Holenia is truly, as the critic Hermann Bahr calls him, a "goldsmith of words." The Eridanos Press is to be commended for publishing these two extraordinary novellas in such a fine edition. Lemet-Holenia is an artist who deserves to be read by serious students of contemporary writing. -- From Independent Publisher