A review of The Master of the Day of Judgment

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SOURCE: A review of The Master of the Day of Judgment, in The London Mercury, Vol. XXI, No. 123, January, 1930, pp. 272-73.

[In the following excerpt, Lloyd reviews The Master of the Day of Judgment, asserting that the quality of the English translation preserves the tone, style, and atmosphere of Perutz's carefully crafted prose.]

We are grateful for the translation that allows us to read the Master of the Day of Judgment: and we are particularly grateful to Mr. Hedrig Singer who has so well converted the original German of Herr Leo Perutz that it is possible for us to feel the force of atmosphere so powerfully. The obliquities of translation scarcely intrude themselves. For an atmosphere of real growing tension and horror it would be hard to find many equals in similar books of recent years. The use of the graphic present, which so often sounds unreal in a translation from the German, here is carefully controlled to heighten the vividness of the presentation. A haze of supernatural horrors clouds the book with increasing density, and the explanation which might easily, in the hands of a less distinguished writer, fall into the banal and commonplace, here takes on the correct tone of unearthly reality. It is decidedly not a book for the bedside: the strings of naked pagan fear are so well played on that an uncomfortable chill sensation must be left on even the midday reader. Those who like sensation will certainly not be disappointed. We all know the contrasts of the real and unreal which are so striking and forcible when the mind is in a hypersensitive state, and we must applaud the art which handles these delicate sensations, so that we are never oppressed, but feel a heightened absorption in the mind which is their focus. Too much has been made of this kind of technique in modern German literature and cinematograph films: the insignificant movements of other people and things that bore down into the memory when the mind has been unhinged by a terrific shock are so easy for an author to invent, but so hard to make significant and impressive. Herr Perutz has done this difficult feat with consummate art. The rapid stream of the plot is never impeded by its excursions through the caverns of mental psychology. It is a book not easy to forget.

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