Leo Perutz

Excellent récit fantastique publié en 1936 et situé dans l'Allemagne de 1700. A partir d'une imposture d'identité, s'élaborent, dans un climat de légende, les aventures d'un brigand repenti qui réussit à être heureux le temps d'un pacte avec un fantôme.

"A thief and a nobleman, both down on their luck, cross paths on a bitter winter's day in 1701. One, known locally as "The Fowl-Filcher," is fleeing the gallows; the other, the callow Christian von Tornefeld, has escaped execution to fight for his Swedish king. Neither will reach his destination. Sent with a message to secure aid for von Tornefeld, the thief falls in love with his companion's secret fiance;e. He resolves to win her love for himself, and through a clever stratagem, exchanges his fate for the other man's. Risking everything to attain the woman and station of his dreams, he becomes the Swedish cavalier, staying one step ahead of exposure. Later, he sacrifices everything so that is daughter won't learn of his secret past. In this book he considered is masterpiece, Leo Perutz has created a picaresque world of barons and brigands, swashbuckling dragoons and spurned lovers, gentleman farmers and masked robbers, and lucky parchments, magic spells, and mystical visions. Part adventure, part historical novel of war-ravaged Europe, The Sweddish Cavalier is also a moral tale of deceit, betrayal, and redemption. "--

Vienna, 1909. When the celebrated actor Eugen Bischoff is found shot dead in his garden pavilion, suspicion falls immediately on Baron von Yosch, a well-to-do army officer who was once the lover of the dead man's wife, Dina. By all appearances, the actor took his own life - two shots had rung out, and the door was locked from inside - but clearly someone, or some thing, drove him to it. While Dina's brother prepares to expose the baron, two of the actor's friends accept his claims of innocence and lend their support to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, within a few days other, similar suicides are reported. And what started out as a straightforward effort to establish the actor's last deeds becomes a search through the ages, in an atmosphere of deepening terror, for an invisible enemy identified only through the actor's dying whisper, "...the Day of Judgment." . In this probing mystery, Leo Perutz combines his hallmark blend of suspense and the fantastic in a tale that leads back into history and forward to the bloodred trumpets of the Apocalypse, to a day of judgment that each of us carries within himself.

"In turn of the century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his keep as a tutor of the children of the professional class, must urgently come up with two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend Sonja Hartmann to Italy in order to prevent her from going with the well-off law student Georg Weiner. In a series of highly humorous and intricately-connected vignettes the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the enigmatic and generally unsympathetic Demba cascading through the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he strives to conceal his shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class, university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, and gamblers and high-class thieves, Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin-de-siecle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled "Freedom" in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display in Between Nine and Nine are the author's skills as storyteller and caricaturist; his subtle and satiric humor; his highly refined apathetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers unfamiliar with Leo Perutz will find him delightfully provocative."--Jacket.