Everything about Leo Perutz totally explained
Leopold Perutz (
November 2,
1882 –
August 25,
1957) was a
German language 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 world-class 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.
During the 1950s he returned occasionally to
Austria, where he eventually died. 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.
Overview
Perutz' novels are short, elegantly written and are usually
historical novels combining fast-paced, crisply told adventure with a
metaphysical twist.
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 a 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, didn't 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.
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)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Leo Perutz'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://leo_perutz.totallyexplained.com">Leo Perutz Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
