Count Luna and Baron Bagge

Two Stories

De: Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Narrado por: John Sackville, Michael Golab

Brought to you by Penguin.

In Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a strangely peaceful land where festivities are in full swing. There he meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, and finds himself falling in a strange enchanted love - a love harrowed at its edges by the threat of the enemy, and the peculiar fragility of this country's otherworldly peace...

In Count Luna, 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 vengeance?

©2022 Alexander Lernet-Holenia (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Baron Bagge, an unsettling tale of war trauma, superbly and uniquely told

A World War I soldier navigates a war zone on the Eastern front, and more otherworldly spaces, in this reissued modernist novella.

This eerie, affecting tale, first published in German in 1936 and published in English translation in 1956, is narrated by the title character, a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army fighting off Russians near the Carpathian Mountains in 1915.

Much as in his novel Count Luna, published in English the same year, Lernet-Holenia has a knack for capturing the melancholic, paranoid mood that pollutes minds in wartime.

This reissued edition includes a brief, admiring foreword by Patti Smith and a handful of letters between the author and fellow Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who writes that it is "positively magical the way dream and reality glide seamlessly into one another." Fog-of-war tales are always abundant, but this one conjures a unique spell.