BARON BAGGE

A World War I soldier navigates a war zone, and more otherworldly spaces, in this reissued modernist novella.

This eerie, affecting tale, first published in German in 1955 and published in English translation a year later, is narrated by the title character, a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army fighting off Russians near the Carpathian Mountains in 1915. The opening pages exhibit the familiar tropes of a war story—spies hanged from a tree, brutal (but eventually successful) combat with the Russians, internal squabbles among his fellow commissioned officers. (The narrator fumes at a pair of colleagues who seem to share a private joke about him.) But soon the plot takes on a peculiar, more surrealistic cast, even while the prose remains firmly realistic. The narrator and a young woman become enchanted with each other, to the point of rushing to marriage; the dreaded Russian forces are apparently not just defeated, but vanished; the locals in the town where the soldiers are billeted are blithe in the face of threats, even “throwing money by the handfuls out of the window.” Something’s off, and readers of Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” may have a good sense of what. But much as in his novel Count Luna, published the same year (also recently reissued), Lernet-Holenia has a knack for capturing the melancholic, paranoid mood that pollutes minds in wartime. This reissued edition includes a brief, admiring foreword by Patti Smith and a handful of letters between the author and fellow Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who writes that it is "positively magical the way dream and reality glide seamlessly into one another." Fog-of-war tales are always abundant, but this one conjures a unique spell.

An unsettling tale of war trauma, cleanly and uniquely told.