Count Luna (Penguin Modern Classics)

'A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear' Patti Smith

The war is over but Alexander Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian aristocrat and industrialist, is haunted by guilt over the neighbour he inadvertently sent to a concentration camp, Count Luna. What's more, he is convinced that Luna survived - and is out to get his revenge. So begins a wild, weird cat-and-mouse chase that takes him and his shadowy nemesis through windswept valleys, eerie houses and, eventually, Rome's catacombs, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: will Luna stop at nothing to exact his bloody vengeance? Crazed, raging and darkly comic, Count Luna is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.

'Like Kafka ... Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams ... with exquisitely imagined detail' Chicago Tribune

Reviews

In Count Luna, an industrialist inadvertently responsible for sending a man to a concentration camp feels certain that the fellow survived the war and is mounting a shadowy campaign of revenge. Like Kafka [...] Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams into the texture of what happens next with exquisitely imagined detail