Alexander Lernet-Holenia – författare

'A masterpiece' Stefan Zweig'Compelling ... intense ... blending military narratives, paranormal experiences and erotic obsessions' TLSBaron Bagge, a cavalry officer during the First World War, receives orders from his unhinged commander to ride into Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a peaceful, otherworldly country where festivities are in full swing. There he finds himself entangled in a strange love, yet is harrowed by the threat of the enemy, and intimations from his fellow officers about the nature of his survival. A story of duty and desire, courage and stupidity, Baron Bagge is a waking dream of a novel.

'A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear' Patti SmithThe war is over but Alexander Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian aristocrat and industrialist, is haunted by guilt over the neighbour he inadvertently sent to a concentration camp, Count Luna. What's more, he is convinced that Luna survived - and is out to get his revenge. So begins a wild, weird cat-and-mouse chase that takes him and his shadowy nemesis through windswept valleys, eerie houses and, eventually, Rome's catacombs, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: will Luna stop at nothing to exact his bloody vengeance? Crazed, raging and darkly comic, Count Luna is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.'Like Kafka ... Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams ... with exquisitely imagined detail' Chicago Tribune

A haunting novel of love, fate and war from the Austrian master and acclaimed author of Baron Bagge and Count Luna ('A book so astonishing I immediately re-read it' – Patti Smith)‘He’d had the feeling that he was expected there, on that day. But by whom?’Vienna, 1939. Lieutenant Wallmoden is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’ when he meets the austerely beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors and her elusive circle of acquaintances. He promises to see her again – but then discovers his company has been mobilised for war. Marching across Europe, stumbling across the border between the living and the dead, one constant remains: he must keep his tryst with the Baroness, in this world or the next.Banned by the Nazis and almost lost, Mars in Aries is an erotically charged ghost story, a shocking account of the invasion of Poland, and a mesmeric exploration of time and fate.Translated by Robert Dassanowsky and John Barrett

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksBaron Bagge, a cavalry officer during the First World War, receives orders from his unhinged commander to ride into Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a peaceful, otherworldly country where festivities are in full swing… Alexander Lernet-Holenia, championed in his lifetime by Roberto Calasso, Stefan Zweig and Rainer Maria Rilke, triumphs in this dreamlike novel of mystery and yearning.

At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests the Nazis, and when his board of directors asks him to go along with confiscating a neighbor’s large parcel of land for their thriving wartime business, Jessiersky refuses. Yet, without his knowledge, the board succeeds in sending the owner of the land, a certain Count Luna, to a Nazi concentration camp on a trumped-up charge.Years later the war is over, but after a series of mysterious events, Jessiersky, deeply paranoid, becomes convinced that Count Luna has survived and seeks vengeance; driven to kill the source of his dread, he decides to hunt down Luna—and his years-long chase after the spectral count finally takes him deep into the catacombs of Rome…The nightmare logic of Count Luna comes from deep within Jessiersky’s festering fears and serves up his brooding, insanity-spiced, delicious disquisitions—on what the Etruscans knew, on cemeteries as originally “sleeping places”—before coming at last to death itself: “Well, well, well, thought Jessiersky, swallowing hard. So you do die after all. You refuse to believe that someday you will die but then you die. And you don’t even notice it. And yet the fact that you don’t is the best thing about dying...”

A novel of love and valor, war and stupidity, life and death (as well as what may lay beyond our mortal coils), Baron Bagge concerns a young Austrian cavalry lieutenant in the Carpathian mountains at the beginning of WWI. The baron leads a desperate charge across a bridge to meet the Russian forces, following the orders of his mentally unstable commander:“We were soon to have proof of his unreliability… But perhaps it is not right to place the blame on him. Perhaps his foolishness was merely the instrument of fate, and the disaster into which he led his squadron, the slaughter of so many men and horses, took place in order that something which could no longer happen within the realm of the living—because it was too late—could happen after life.” And, swaying in a kind of fugue, the baron wanders off the bridge into unknown realms, where—mesmerized by Lernet-Holenia’s phosphorescent style—the reader joins his waking dream.

'A masterpiece' Stefan Zweig'Compelling ... intense ... blending military narratives, paranormal experiences and erotic obsessions' TLSBaron Bagge, a cavalry officer during the First World War, receives orders from his unhinged commander to ride into Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a peaceful, otherworldly country where festivities are in full swing. There he finds himself entangled in a strange love, yet is harrowed by the threat of the enemy, and intimations from his fellow officers about the nature of his survival. A story of duty and desire, courage and stupidity, Baron Bagge is a waking dream of a novel.

'A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear' Patti SmithThe war is over but Alexander Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian aristocrat and industrialist, is haunted by guilt over the neighbour he inadvertently sent to a concentration camp, Count Luna. What's more, he is convinced that Luna survived - and is out to get his revenge. So begins a wild, weird cat-and-mouse chase that takes him and his shadowy nemesis through windswept valleys, eerie houses and, eventually, Rome's catacombs, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: will Luna stop at nothing to exact his bloody vengeance? Crazed, raging and darkly comic, Count Luna is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.'Like Kafka ... Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams ... with exquisitely imagined detail' Chicago Tribune

A haunting novel of love, fate and war from the Austrian master and acclaimed author of Baron Bagge and Count Luna ('A book so astonishing I immediately re-read it' – Patti Smith)‘He’d had the feeling that he was expected there, on that day. But by whom?’Vienna, 1939. Lieutenant Wallmoden is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’ when he meets the austerely beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors and her elusive circle of acquaintances. He promises to see her again – but then discovers his company has been mobilised for war. Marching across Europe, stumbling across the border between the living and the dead, one constant remains: he must keep his tryst with the Baroness, in this world or the next.Banned by the Nazis and almost lost, Mars in Aries is an erotically charged ghost story, a shocking account of the invasion of Poland, and a mesmeric exploration of time and fate.Translated by Robert Dassanowsky and John Barrett