Count Luna
by Alexander Lernet-Holenia
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.
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