Leo Perutz - Overview

Overview

Perutz' novels are short and are usually historical novels combining fast-paced adventure with a metaphysical twist. They are influenced by the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schnitzler and Victor Hugo (whose work Perutz translated into German). Austrian fellow novelist Friedrich Torberg once characterized Perutz' literary style as the possible result of a little infidelity of Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie. The Marquis of Bolibar features the Wandering Jew appearing during Napoleon's campaign in Spain. 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.

In his discussion of German language fantastic literature, critic Franz Rottensteiner describes Perutz as "undoubtedly the finest fantasy author of his time".

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