![]() ![]() ![]() The book's original title was "Freedom" its small-scale narrative of restraint and flight feels like a deeply meditated protest against the oppressive hierarchies of the world into which Perutz was born. The handcuffed hero's increasingly desperate maneuvers as he makes his way through the nightmarish crannies of Franz Joseph's Vienna take on the quality of an Expressionist chase movie, and in true Perutzian fashion there is a neatly devastating reversal in the tale's final paragraphs. His early novel "From Nine to Nine," an international best seller in its day, eschews the supernatural trappings of some of his tales (among them the superb "The Swedish Cavalier" and "The Master of the Day of Judgment") in its seemingly down-to-earth, minute-by-minute account of an impoverished young student on the run after committing a petty crime. A year older than his Prague compatriot Franz Kafka and later much admired by Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Perutz forged his own variety of the paranoid fantastic. ![]()
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