Masochist
Perat tells the story of Nadezhda Moser, fictional stepdaughter of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a foundling he discovered abandoned in a basket in the forest. The story is told in flashback, starting in Lemberg (now Lviv, in the Ukraine), where Sacher-Masoch has gone to avoid a short prison sentence in his native Austria. Nadezhda ultimately marries Maximilian, even though “we were in love, but our love was a matter of solitude. Each of us experienced it separately, only for it to vanish on the day when we took up with each other again”.
The reader knows already the marriage is going to be troubled, when in the first chapter Nadezhda confides to an innkeeper that her husband has shot and killed her lover. Much of the action in this beguiling novel, elegantly translated from the original Slovene, takes place in turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna, where the heroine encounters Gustav Klimt and his models, Gustav and Alma Mahler, and an impassioned Theodor Herzl.
This is, however, Nadezhda’s tale, narrated in an absorbing first person; it might be more accurate to say that these eminent figures encounter her. Periodically Nadezhda has consultations with Freud (who else?) but appears to get the better of him regularly, in some of the sparkiest dialogue in the book. She finally takes refuge with Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis; her other houseguest is a querulous Rainer Maria Rilke. A foreigner, who talks to Nadezhda in a Trieste café until he is fetched away by his angry wife, turns out to be Joyce. But it is the troubled, clever, disconcerting Nadezhda who dominates these pages; one wishes she had actually existed, more than those whom she meets.
