I thought this was going to be right up my street (whoever wrote the blurb for this new Penguin edition needs a pay rise), but the reality proved to be a little disappointing. There are a few too many longueurs and digressions for a short book, but fundamentally it’s just not as weird as I was hoping and expecting. There is a nice vein of pitch black comedy throughout, which helps, but ultimately I wanted something more fantastical.

The novel gets off to a cracking start as Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat insists against all pleading from priests in descending down to the Catacombs of Praetextatus in post war Rome. He claims he wants to locate the remains of two French priests believed to have vanished in the passageways. However, after two days when Jessiersky himself also fails to emerge from the catacombs, his disappearance is reported to the police who link him to some incidents in Austria. We discover that during World War II that Jessierky was a major shareholder in a transport company. His company wanted to buy land from Count Luna, but Count Luna refused all offers, so Jessierky and his co investors denounced Count Luna to the Nazi regime and he was sent to a camp. It is almost certain that the Count perished but Jessierky becomes paranoid that Count Luna is alive and stalking him, even trying to poison his children.

I found that the intial premise of the book really drew me in. The tension and dark sense of dread was palpable. However, the narrative became becalmed and bogged down in digressions such as recounting the Jessiersky family lineage which added nothing and in fact really detracted from the storyline. I feel that with editing this would be a fantastic short story or novella but the lack of consistent pacing and the segues made this a bit of a slog to read and although first published in 1955 it read like a novel from an earlier period.

I do wonder to what degree the dense text and style of Count Luna stems from it being a 1955 Austrian novel in German and the kind of translation that would have been available in the fifties. Its an intriguing read because it is quite different, and the detail-rich forensic storytelling fits well with the lead character's spiraling paranoia. Strongly allegorical, the story (after a somewhat odd framing sequence and a lot of family history) takes in a minor Polish noble, in a second-generation Austrian exile, who due to a whim got the Count Luna of the title sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Despite being assured that Count Luna died, he starts to see him everywhere and soon reacts to these sightings in increasingly outlandish and eventually deadly ways. A classic tale of paranoic thinking, it also presents as a not-at-all-subtle allegory to post-war Austrian guilt about the Anchluss, and Austrian involvement in the war.

Its actually quite a short novel for all of its long dense paragraphs taking us through the tangled lineage of our protagonist Jessiersky, and his obsession with the lineage of Count Luna (Spanish, Catalonian, Portuguese, Polish?) There is a lightness of touch that makes it through the translation in these chunks of Debretts, the reader is bathed in these meaningless details, particularly when it comes to Luna, a man who we know was surely murdered in a concentration camp. But then the book leaves the Nazi years as a void, is what happens to Jessiersky some kind of divine retribution for his unthinking bad turn, or is Jessiersky's own guilt weaponised against him? The book mainly plough he latter end, but the engagement of spiritual actors - from priests to a vision of the afterlife - allows a looser reading. But then this is the case for any moral action, do you need punishment in this life, or the next, to know what you did was wrong? Interestingly morality very rarely raises its head in the text, but is fundamentally what the book is about.

Count Luna is a punchy if unfashionable literally translated post-war classic. Its storyline is simple, and like many a morality tale you will almost certainly work out what will happen to Jessiersky by the halfway point. But the morality tale is all in the telling, and this is a nicely satirical take.

Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897 – 1976) was an Austrian poet and novelist, as well as a writer of plays and screenplays. Lernet-Holenia’s lifetime was one of epochal cultural and political changes, during which he often found himself conflicted. His novel Mars im Widder (Mars In Winter) has been described as “the only Austrian resistance novel” and was banned by the Nazis on its publication. On the other hand, while refusing to actively support the Nazis, Lernet-Holenia survived under the regime, amongst other things, by becoming chief dramaturgist for the audiovisual media centre of the Wehrmacht, although his increasing outspokenness against the regime eventually cost him his job. After the war, he achieved public recognition as one of the leading writers in Austria, but in the 60s, his generally conservative stance once again put him at odds with the prevailing culture.

Perhaps there is something of his character and experiences in Count Luna, a novel originally published in German in 1955 as Der Graf Luna, and now being reissued on Penguin Modern Classics.

The work’s protoganist is not the eponymous Count but, rather, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat and company owner whose fate becomes entwined with that of the mysterious Luna. During the war, the board of directors of Jessiersky’s company appropriates Luna’s last remaining piece of land and, faced with Luna’s opposition, has him sent to a concentration camp. Jessiersky has scant interest in either politics or business, and is consumed by guilt at a crime which he did not stop and ended up complicit in. While Jessiersky’s remorse initially seems a redeeming factor, it eventually turns into a darkly farcical obsession with the figure of Count Luna. By all accounts, Luna died in the concentration camp, but Jessiersky suspects that his victim – now a vengeful antagonist – is not really dead, but very much alive and out to get him. What follows is an increasingly surreal cat-and-mouse game which ends with a hallucinatory scene in the netherworldly darkness of Rome’s catacombs.

Count Luna is a tragicomic literary thriller. Behind its genre-bending trappings, it is also a philosophical meditation on the horrors of the 20th century, on guilt and complicity, and on the twilight of an old world whose ideals ended up degraded and warped.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2024/04/count-luna-by-alexander-lernet-holenia.html

Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s hallucinatory, post-WW2 novel revolves around Alexander Jessiersky, an affluent man who’s somehow survived wartime Vienna unscathed. His wealth and social status even enabled him to avoid the ravages of battle. Yet when Lernet-Holenia’s narrative opens Jessiersky is about to do something inexplicable, he’s insisting on exploring labyrinthine Roman catacombs in pursuit of two long-lost priests who entered but never returned. The question of why Jessiersky has decided to do something so foolhardy frames the story that follows, as Lernet-Holenia reaches back through time to Jessiersky’s ancestors in Poland, then to Jessiersky’s birth and subsequent experiences.

Jessiersky’s oddly detached, cynical even. He’s married with children but regards his family as little more than social necessity, an extension of his property. He’s disdainful of everyone around him except for one man Count Luna, someone he’s never met yet considers a deadly foe. Falsely accused of treachery during the war, Luna was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, all because he refused to sell his land to Jessiersky’s company. The war’s over, Luna’s almost certainly dead but Jessiersky is unable to believe it. Jessiersky’s convinced Luna survived and is in pursuit, intent on a terrible revenge - although Jessiersky refuses to take actual responsibility for Luna’s imprisonment. As days, weeks, then months pass, Jessiersky’s increasingly obsessed, imagining Luna always just out of sight, poised to attack. His feelings of persecution gradually turn Jessiersky’s life into a fever dream. "Know your enemy," becomes his mantra. He researches into Luna’s past, fixating on apparent similarities between them. Gradually Luna begins to seem part elemental force akin to the moon itself, part doppelganger – echoing aspects of Luna’s namesake from Verdi’s opera. Suspicions that drive Jessiersky to commit a series of desperate, murderous crimes.

Lernet-Holenia’s restless narrative shifts between noir-ish thriller, dry comedy, and surreal twist on a gothic, ghost story - Joseph Roth meets Poe meets Kafka. Along the way, Lernet-Holenia delves into issues of heritage and rootlessness which he links to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, paving the way for disorder. Jessiersky’s is a world after the fall, in which the old ways, the old hierarchies no longer hold. Pragmatism rules: the “liberating” allies are morally suspect; ordinary Austrians adopt whatever political stance seems the safest bet; and even faithful servants might kill you while you sleep. Only money, more precisely capitalism, retains its force: despite his lack of effort, Jessiersky’s fortune steadily increases. It’s a world in which guilt can be avoided by recasting the war’s victims like Luna, as villains – like the Jewish survivors attempting to reclaim the homes "requisitioned" during their absence. Jessiersky’s predicament seems symptomatic of a wider, postwar existential crisis. Jessiersky’s compulsive thoughts about Luna mirror his growing sense of dislocation, trauma and an awareness of the fragility of his society. Despite some slightly static passages, this was unexpectedly gripping, a wildly unpredictable, intense vision of postwar Austria. Translated by Jane B. Greene.

The protagonist allows a man, Count Luna to be sent to a concentration camp. Although his lack of empathy is seen throughout the book (for his wife and children for example), his guilt sends him spiralling into obsessive madness, convinced that Luna is stalking him and his family to get revenge.
I found this a strange book. I quite liked the fact that sections felt like a history or science lesson, but there are other sections that dragged and I found myself losing focus on the plot. The ending was wierd and wonderful though and a great wrap up for this unusual story.
Thank you netgalley for this ARC
#NetGalley
#CountLuna

What a strange book this is! I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I fully understood everything the author was trying to say. It’s the first book I’ve read by Alexander Lernet-Holenia and I’m definitely now interested in reading more.

Count Luna was first published in German in 1955 (Lernet-Holenia was an Austrian author) and appeared in an English translation by Jane B. Greene a year later. It has recently been published in a new edition by Penguin Classics.

The novel begins with Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, entering the Catacombs of Praetextatus in Rome, apparently in search of two French priests believed to have vanished somewhere in the underground passageways. When Jessiersky himself also fails to emerge from the catacombs, his disappearance is reported to the police, who link him with a series of incidents which occurred in Austria and are still under investigation. The rest of the book is presented as an account of Jessiersky’s life leading up to the disappearance, based on reports by the Italian and Austrian authorities.

We learn that at the start of World War II, Jessiersky is the head of a large Viennese transport company. When the company tries to purchase some land belonging to Count Luna, who refuses to sell, the board of directors come up with a plan to confiscate the land and have Luna sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Jessiersky himself is not involved in this, but does nothing to prevent it from happening – and so, when the war is over, he begins to worry that Luna has survived the camp and is coming back to take his revenge.

On one level, Count Luna could be described as a psychological thriller; told mainly from Jessiersky’s perspective, there’s a growing sense of paranoia and fear as he becomes convinced that Count Luna is following him around Vienna, watching from the shadows, breaking into his house and even trying to poison his children. Whether any of these things are true or only exist in Jessiersky’s imagination I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. The atmosphere becomes very dark and the feeling of tension increases as the novel heads towards its conclusion and Jessiersky enters the catacombs – and from this point the story becomes quite bizarre and even more nightmarish.

At 160 pages, Count Luna is a short novel, but took longer than I expected to read as there are some long, detailed digressions into subjects such as the lineage of the Jessiersky family, which need some concentration from the reader (and don’t really add a lot to the story as a whole). Apart from the references to the war, it felt more like a book written in the 19th century than one written in the 1950s. The war is a crucial part of the story, however, and I’ve seen reviews suggesting that Lernet-Holenia was drawing parallels between Jessiersky’s guilt over Luna’s fate and Austria’s own post-war guilt, which does make a lot of sense. I also think the name Luna (the moon) is no coincidence, as Jessiersky discovers that trying to escape from Luna – and therefore from his guilt – is as useless as trying to escape from the moon.

Although I didn’t love this book as much as I thought I was going to at the beginning, I did find it completely fascinating and it left me with a lot to think about.

Had moments of intrigue and tension, and did a good job of capturing a mood of paranoia and uncertainty. Unfortunately there was also lots of info dumping and exposition that was frankly very dry and that overtook any of the positives for me.

Starting the story with Jessiersky entering the catacombs was intriguing and hooked me instantly. What followed were four chapters (1/3 of the book) of info dumping about family trees and heritage that took me out of the story and made me lose my momentum until the very end.
The decent into madness and the different situations that ended up with the perishing of characters was fascinating to read and the historical context of the story was very interesting but the narrator made the reader always step back and full pause throughout the whole book by pages and pages of information that didn’t really add anything to what was actually happening. Therefore my enjoyment dwindled the more I read. I would’ve dnf‘d if the book wasn’t only 160 pages long.