Leo Perutz
Tempo di Spettri

“… wickedness, thirst for revenge, and baseness of soul were the holy trinity of the time …” that time was the early years of the post-war period. More precisely, it was a time that unfolded over a territory encompassing Central Europe and revolutionary Russia. A time to which imagination has the illusion of returning at the sound of words like: crowns, kopecks, thalers, slivovitz, dragoons, the dances of the moment, Cercle du Bosphore cigarettes, snow on Prospect and Straße, hunger … even though that time hasn’t passed over our skin, it has worn out our bones.

The book is a profound hallucination lasting two years, that of a man who, in the name of pride and thirst for revenge, sacrifices what is good and dear to him in life, and down, straight to the bottom of that vortex, he drags along the lives of the companions he finds along his path.

Looking at a photo of Leo Perutz, the author, you would know what a Bohemian writer looks like, and at the same time, you would also know what a writer who hasn’t received a fraction of the fame he deserved looks like.

Some consider him among the founders of the fantastic-historical genre (a plot derived from grafting fantasy tales onto historical facts), others say that it is too reductive to attribute his works to that genre. I only mention this because I neither have the knowledge nor the desire to delve deeper.

For what it's worth, which is nothing, he is one of my favorite writers. Can one be sober in an original way? For someone like me who can only be tipsy in a completely conventional way, it was quite a discovery. Perutz’s writing, in my opinion, is characterized by this kind of sobriety and such elegance. He manages to assemble dialogues, thoughts, and narrative with extreme precision by proceeding by subtraction: between putting a word or not, if you can, it's better not to put it. By wringing the pages of this book, you won't extract a drop of rhetoric or emphasis, yet, or precisely because of this, the author manages to draw the reader into the depths of the infernal circles they describe.