Leo Perutz
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This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the German Wikipedia. (December 2009) Click [show] on the right for instructions.
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Leopold Perutz (November 2, 1882, Prague - August 25, 1957, Bad Ischl) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. He was born in Prague and was thus a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine.
According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, Leo was a mathematician who formulated an algebraic equation which is named after him; he worked as a statistician for an insurance company. He was related to the biologist Max Perutz.[1]
During the 1950s he returned occasionally to Austria, spending the summer and autumn months in the market town of St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut resort region and in Vienna. He died in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1957. He wrote his first novel, The Third Bullet, in 1915 while recovering from a wound sustained in the First World War. In all Perutz wrote eleven novels, which gained the admiration of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ian Fleming, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Greene. Wagner cited Perutz' novel The Master of the Day of Judgement as one of the thirteen best non-supernatural horror novels.[2]
[edit] Overview
Perutz' novels are short and are usually historical novels combining fast-paced adventure with a metaphysical twist. Austrian fellow novelist Friedrich Torberg once characterized Perutz' literary style as the possible result of a little infidelity of Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie. By Night Under the Stone Bridge is an episodic work whose separate stories are bound together by the illicit love shared, in their dreams, by a Jewish woman and the Emperor Rudolf II. In the posthumously-published Leonardo's Judas, da Vinci's quest for an appropriate face to give the betrayer in his Last Supper is interwoven with the squabble between an usurer and the merchant to whom he owes money. The title of Saint Peter's Snow, which is set in what was then the present day (1932), refers to a drug which induces religious fervour; the Nazis, understandably, did not care for it. The Master of the Day of Judgement is a decidedly different mystery story about the circumstances surrounding an actor's death in the early twentieth century, and Little Apple concerns a First World War soldier's obsessive quest for revenge.
[edit] Novels by Perutz in English translation
(Dates of publication are for the original German-language editions)
- From Nine to Nine (1918)
- The Marquis of Bolibar (1920)
- The Master of the Day of Judgement (1921)
- Turlupin (1924)
- Little Apple (1928)
- Saint Peter's Snow (1933)
- The Swedish Cavalier (1936)
- By Night under the Stone Bridge (1952)
- Leonardo's Judas (1959)
[edit] References
- ^ Max Ferdinand Perutz OM FRS, obituary by Alan R. Fersht.
- ^ N. G. Christakos, "Three By Thirteen: The Karl Edward Wagner Lists" in Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner, ed. Benjamin Szumskyj, Gothic Press 2007.
[edit] Read On
- Hans Harald Müller: Leo Perutz (biography, München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992)
- Neuhaus, Dietrich: Errinerung und Schrecken. DieEinheit von Geschichte, Phantastik und Mathematik im Werk Leo Perutz (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1984)
- Brigitte Forster, Hans Harald Müller (Hrsg.): Leo Perutz. Unruhige Träume - Abgründige Konstruktionen. Dimensionen des Werks, Stationen der Wirkung. (Wien: Sonderzahl, 2002) ISBN 3-85449-197-2.
- Ulrike Siebauer: Leo Perutz Ich kenne alles. Alles, nur nicht mich. (biography, Gerlingen: Bleicher, 2000)
