SOURCE: A review of Little Apple, in VLS, No. 106, June, 1992, p. 6.

In the following essay, Garner discusses characteristic themes and stylistic traits of Perutz's fiction and reviews Little Apple.

"Every writer," Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "creates his own precursors." Small wonder that Borges, who had not yet composed his ficciones when the Prague-born novelist Leo Perutz published the bulk of his eleven novels in the late 1920s and early '30s, was charmed by Perutz's work. Perutz so knowingly inventoried the characteristics that streak Borges's prose—the metaphysical dream logic, the attention to senseless truths, a penchant for the fantastic—that Perutz could almost have concocted the Argentinian master as an antecedent.

Happily for the thousands of readers who gobbled down his popular fictions as they were serialized in German language newspapers, Perutz had a gift for terse, breathless narrative. His novels rush you over the river and...