PAUL LEPPIN: THE LIGHT IN DARKNESS
Paul Leppin’s dark novels should not be read in spring, when the days are long and full of bloom. His perfect, twisted little book Severin’s Journey Into The Dark and the doubly twisted Blaugast: A Novel Of Decline are meant to be read by candlelight in the deepest nights of winter. Or perhaps one should approach Leppin’s dark work beneath the watchful eye of the sun, both for the sake of one’s sanity and because Leppin is the sun’s dark cousin.
Where the sun brings light to the world, Leppin revels in exploring the strange light that exists in the depths of his characters’ depraved souls. Blaugast is a clerk who abandons himself to sensual self-destruction. Stricken with a heavy melancholy and malaise—one that reflects the mystical squalor of Prague circa 1900-1930, which Leppin vividly depicts—Blaugast suffers both physical and spiritual fevers caused by his journeys into the dark.
In the opening scene of the book, an old school friend invites Blaugast to a seamy bar where he meets the prostitute Wanda. She immediately casts a spell on him and takes over his life. The tone of both the book and Blaugast’s temperament are set when Leppin writes, “Fate had come to Blaugast out of the tunnels of night. An apocalyptic woman had seized him… like a lifeless stone, he sank to the bottom, into the throes of sex, into the insanity of his fate, into the sleep of the damned.”
Wanda arranges sexual choreographies for Blaugast, which leave him so stricken that he is no longer interested in going to his job or being part of the everyday world. Wanda then turns Blaugast into her servant in his own apartment while she services the men who bring her money now that he has none to offer. He lets his physical appearance go, begs for offerings on the street, is given the nickname “Little Baron” and asked to “do the bird” by the denizens of Prague’s nightlife that Leppin describes so well. Blaugast obliges, hops and squawks, aware now that “he had become a peddler of his own corruption.”
The single ray of light in the book is Johanna, a prostitute who discovers a connection with Blaugast, but she too is a dark light shining on a dark world. If, in the end, Blaugast is a love story, then it’s certainly not the kind that mainstream Hollywood would ever produce. Still, there are revelations and scenes of strange and twisted beauty in Leppin’s narrative, where “life isn’t all glitter, even for the fortunate,” where “there grows no hedgerow separating misery from eternal bliss,” and where “the pangs of love are indestructible, and for everyone the same.”
