SOURCE: A review of The Marquis de Bolibar, in The Saturday Review, London, Vol. 142, No. 3698, September 11, 1926, pp. 292-93.

In the following excerpt, Hartley offers a generally enthusiastic appraisal of The Marquis de Bolivar.

Romantic, heroic, symbolic, fantastic, obscure, occult—epithets that fit some aspect of The Marquis de Bolibar, suggest themselves readily enough. But it is much less easy to catch the author's whole intention and condense it in a word. Here is what purports to be an incident in the Peninsular War. The preface, a monument of Teutonic thoroughness, short but solid, introduces us to the memoirs of Edward von Jochberg who was, at the time of the capture of La Bisbal, a lieutenant in a Hessian regiment serving under Napoleon. Our interest, we must own, slumbered through Mr. Leo Perutz's well-worn device to awaken it: we learned that neither Dr. Hermann Schwartze, nor F. Krause, nor...