Saint Peter's Snow

There is a Borgesian timelessness to most of Perutz I've read (or vice versa?), a universal, alchemical point of view which aligns different periods like so many pieces of lamb on a skewer. Here it acquires a blatant political dimension (the year is 1933...) Amberg, an aimless young doctor, pressed into the profession out of economic pragmatism, and half-absent from himself due to a unrequited, never confessed passion for another student, gets a job with a baron von Malchin in the latter's mist-enveloped domain. Even before he reaches the post there are portents which begin to wind his psyche--he sees the girl he's in love with in the small town closest to the village, and when it turns out that she is von Malchin's scientific show more collaborator, he almost expects it. The dream logic begins to overtake him--or maybe the reality IS this nightmarish? The baron's project is, first, to bring back religious faith to people--through a drug distilled from a wheat mould, or fungus, known as "St. Peter's snow". In the next step, the Holy Roman Empire is to be restored, complete with a legitimate Kaiser, a descendant of the Staufers (or Hohenstaufens) the baron tracked down in a poor Italian family. And then... Something goes wrong. COMPLETELY wrong.

Let's just say the Nazis didn't care one bit for Perutz's prognosis for their imperial dreams. show less

Written in 1933, five years before Perutz fled his native Vienna for a twelve-year exile in Palestine, Saint Peter’s Snow is an expertly constructed story at the intersection of modernist fiction and fable: between-the-wars ennui meets German romanticism, with a narrator all too conscious of his own mind playing tricks, the confusion of memory and dreams, conspiracy and subterfuge played out in a country village over a thrumming folkloric buzz. Perutz conjures characters and setting that can’t help but make a story: a Berlin physician without ambition, the mouldering estate of a retrograde Westphalian feudal baron with a green Cadillac, a femme fatale biochemist, a dissembling schoolmaster with a pet hedgehog, an impoverished show more priest, and the last members of several royal bloodlines. Throw in a little psychotropic experimentation, a bit of übermenschlich will to power, and some plain carnal longing and you’ve got a smart entertainment that finishes with a satisfying pop. show less

Huvudpersonen hamnar pa vischan som byläkare där han stöter på försök att väcka den religiösa andan med hjälp av en sädessjukdom. Det hela tar dock en oväntad vändning. Egentligen en helt OK bok men en aning långrandig.

Llegit parcialment amnb poc interés.

Bellissimo romanzo di un autore sconosciuto ai più. Vale la pena leggerlo