mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

count luna (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. jane b. greene)

Reading Lernet-Holenia’s curious text which is something of a shaggy dog story, I was myself haunted by the shadow of a Viennese count.

Count Luna tells the story of Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian citizen descended from a mittel-european family with roots in Poland, Ruthenia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the Second World War breaks out, Jessiersky is tasked with buying some land from Count Luna, which he doesn’t want to sell. The end result of this mismanaged transaction is that Luna ends up in a concentration camp, and Jessiersky feels a cloying guilt which then transforms into a vengeful psychosis, as he tries to locate the mysterious Luna, who he believes is taking revenge on him. It’s a novel about psychosis and delirium, which fittingly starts and ends in the catacombs of Rome, the deep substrata of catholic Europe. The ideas don’t go as far as they might, but it’s an entertaining and quietly disturbing read.

My haunting came from realising the Viennese world which Luna, Jessiersky and the author belonged to was also a world my lost grandfather would have shared. He died in the Second World War, my father never knew him, and that whole strand of the family only slightly reconnected in the 21st century. Yet, the shadow of the Viennese count has always lurked in the background. Perhaps acting as a distancing mechanism from the actual world, as Luna does for Jessiersky.