The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob -- beautiful and brilliant.

978098411587

Wakefield Press, 2012

originally published 1894

translated by Kit Schluter

115 p

paperback

With only a couple of minor exceptions, it's been an outstanding reading year so far, and it just got better with The Book of Monelle, by Marcel Schwob. It's such a great feeling when I lose myself in something this good not just once, but twice.  

The story behind The Book of Monelle is a sad one, yet it's  vital to the contents of this little book.  In the translator's afterword, Kit Schluter writes about Schwob meeting Louise, a "young, working-class girl" who may have been a prostitute, who was quite ill with tuberculosis.  The two of them grew very close, and according to Schwob himself, "without her affection, he would have lost his taste for life," 

"She taught him to see again the levity of existence, to find joy in fairy tales and little toys made for children. Perhaps without ever saying it, she taught him that the falsehoods we believe as children are not detrimental or misleading, but joyous and fruitful, that the certainty of adulthood is a sorrowful and wasteful thing." 

They were together for a couple of years, during which time he wrote stories for her, and as her condition deteriorated,  a "fictional girl named Monelle began to appear everywhere" in his little tales, and he began to use the voice of an "adult narrator" who related them "with desperation."   Schluter notes that the name conveys the meaning of something along the lines of  "My-her" (mon elle), which is, if you think about it, just beautiful.   On her death, Schwob was so grief stricken that he couldn't write for a full six months, and then came The Book of Monelle, as Schluter notes in an interview with Paris Review, 

"an assemblage of fairy tales, nihilist philosophy, and aphorisms tightly woven into a tapestry of deep emotional suffering."

That suffering is writ large here and I felt every second of it.

While I won't go into detail -- it's another book that is genuinely felt by the reader -- the book is structured as a sort of triptych.  The first part is called "The Words of Monelle," which begins poignantly with Monelle finding the narrator "in the plain where I was wandering." Here it's easy to imagine the narrator (think Schwob himself) as being lost and unsettled, wandering in grief. She goes on to speak about prostitutes, who "leave the crowds of the night for an act of kindness," who

"heave a cry of compassion to all of you and stroke your hands with their bony hands. They only understand you if you are extremely unfortunate; they cry with you and console you."

More importantly, for the next section, Monelle says

"And I shall lead you among my sisters who are myself and similar to witless prostitutes.

And you shall see them tormented by selfishness and desire and pride and patience and pity, not yet having found themselves at all. And you shall see them set out in search of themselves in the distance..."

However, before arriving at the next section, "The Sisters of Monelle," there is a burst of things that Monelle "shall speak to you of," including destruction, formation, the gods, etc which reminded me of  manifesto-like sutras, or as the translator puts it, "commands."

Once we're in "The Sisters of Monelle" though, the tone changes.  There are a number of short stories in fairy tale/parable form here, parts of which have been mined from already-existing tales, but which are clearly original and incredibly sad. Personally, for me, "The Fated" is the best story of them all, because it really highlights what Schwob is saying here, as does "The Dreamer," but read carefully, it's easy to see that they all reflect what Schwob had written in "The Words of Monelle."

 Part three is entitled "Monelle," which for me was the most gutwrenching part of this entire book, but strangely enough (and most gratefully, I have to say), it does end on a very brief note of hope.  "Of Her Emergence" nearly had me in tears, and I was even worse off by the time I got to "Of Her Patience," where the narrator finds Monelle after having lost her only to be told that he cannot stay with her.  "Of Her Emergence"  begins with the narrator once again lost, in the dark, not knowing how he came to be where he is. It is there where he finds the "dim weak lights of the little lamp girl," who cannot sell her lamps to anyone except children.  As she says,

"...the little lamps I sell don't last forever. Their flames wane, as if burdened by the dark rain. And when my little lamps go out, the children no longer see the glow in the mirror, and they despair. For they fear they won't be able to foresee the moment when they will start to grow up."

That's sad enough, but when the little lamp girl and the narrator look into a mirror by the light of her lamp, he sees "well-known stories play out:"

"But the little lamp lied, lied, lied. I saw the feather rise up from Cordelia's lips; and she was smiling and convalescing; and she was living in an enormous cage like a bird with her old father, and she kissed his white beard. I saw Ophelia playing on the glassy surface of the pond, and wrapping her wet arms, garlanded with violets, around Hamlet's neck. I saw Desdemona, awoken, wandering beneath the willow trees. I saw the princess Maleine take her two hands off the eyes the eyes of the old king, and laugh, and dance. I saw Mélisande, freed, admiring herself in the fountain.

And I cried: 'Lying little lamp...' "

I almost lost it right there, trying to fathom just how much pain this man must have been in while writing this book. The translator notes that as Louise was dying, he

 "spoke to none of his friends of her, but retreated instead into a world of symbol and metaphor, at the center of which was Monelle."

And really,  I've never read such a personal, grief-filled book, but it makes sense that he wrote it. I've read tons of books about people trying to come to terms with loss, but there's something unique about this one. He also, I think, succeeded in keeping Louise alive here, making her immortal through Monelle, and she continues to live with every person who now reads this book.  Jeez -- just read it.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue, by Marghanita Laski

0953478041
Persephone Books, 1999
originally published 1953
99 pp

paperback

At the end of this novel, I was actually very relieved to be out of it -- not because it's not good (it's excellent, as a matter of fact) -- but rather because while I was in it,  I felt as trapped and as powerless as the narrator of this story.  In fact, those two words -- trapped and powerless -- are actually good concepts to use here in thinking about the novel as a whole.

I'm not really going to do much of  that here though, since The Victorian Chaise-Longue is one of those novels that a reader actually feels and so to give away too much just plain wrecks the experience.

We meet first a rather over-indulged, somewhat spoiled Melanie Langdon who has just recently had a baby boy.  She had been diagnosed with tuberculosis early on in the pregnancy, but her two doctors had allowed her to carry her baby to term.   Now, it seems, the doctor has given her a bit of happy news: as long as she continues to rest, to treat herself as if she were "a piece of Dresden china," and have three good TB tests in a row, she'll be able to play with the baby every so often. Not only that, she'll be able to leave the bedroom, the scene of her long confinement, for a "change of view."  The drawing room seems the right place, and Melanie has decided that she could rest on the old Victorian chaise-longue that she'd bought just after she discovered she was pregnant.

She'd found it in an antique shop where she was looking for a cradle, and knew she had to have it -- as she notes, she had a "profound want of this Victorian sofa."  It had the "singular startling quality of berlin-wool cross-stitch embroidery that sprawled in bright gigantic roses from the top of the head-rest to the very end of the seat".  It also had a "brownish stain on the seat," which Melanie didn't care about.  As she looked at it,

"she tried to envisage the frail young mother in the floating clouds of negligée, the tender faces of solicitous admiring friends, but the picture remained in unfelt words, and instead of it there was only her body's need to lie on the Victorian chaise-longue, that, and an overwhelming assurance, or was it a memory, of another body that painfully crushed hers into the berlin-wool."

From then on, it had been an unused fixture in the drawing room of Melanie's house;  back in the present, happy to be away from the bedroom, Melanie lays down on the chaise-longue for the first time:

"And as she lay there, so nearly, so very nearly asleep, she was unthinkingly aware of the sky and the flowers and the music, of the sun-warmed air on her body that was at last sure of happiness to come. Time died away, the solitary burden of human life was transformed in glory, and Melanie, withdrawn in ecstasy, fell asleep." 

She awakes in a "darkness charged with a faint foul smell," and finds herself in the middle of what can only be described as a nightmare that just keeps getting worse as time goes on. The first thing she hears is someone asking her if she's "ready to wake up now," but the question is addressed to "Milly," rather than "Melly," -- and at some point she realizes that she's no longer in her own home or her own time, but in the year 1864.  And that's just the beginning of Melanie's nightmare.

While the novel most certainly reads like a horror novel (and it is most certainly horrific, trust me on that one),  it is impossible to miss what Laski is saying here about women and their lives. By the 1950s, it seems that in some ways, not much had changed from a century earlier -- I used the words "powerless" and "trapped" at the beginning of this post, and  these words epitomize the plights of both women. The idea plays out over and over throughout this story; I'll leave it to others to figure out how.

So - after finishing, a reader's first thought just may be -- "what the heck is going on here," because there are a number of ways the story might be interpreted.  For example, is there something mentally off with Melanie? Or is this book just one long dream that we've stumbled into? Or is it something else entirely?  One thing I noticed was the use of the word "ecstasy" in several places here, so geekperson that I am, I googled "Marghanita Laski and ecstasy" and  I discovered that she had actually written a book in 1961 called Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences.  According to one scholar, in that book, she discusses "the numinous," examining

 "accounts of ecstasy and aesthetic states from average people and from classical mystical experience"  (18)

in order to seek out commonalities.  What follows briefly in that paragraph opened my eyes a bit and offered food for thought relevant to Laski's novel.  It made me wonder if Melanie herself had been somehow caught up in some sort of numinous moment or numinous space (which then required me to go back and reread the novel)  but as I said -- there are different possibilities to explore in this book, which is why I'm adding it to my real-world book group's reading list for October. It is just perfect for an in-depth group discussion, with so much to talk about and to mull over.

To say I was locked into this book is an understatement .  It is just so powerful and when I say that it didn't let me go, it's not cliché --  I really mean it.  I was so eager for the book to end, not because I didn't like it (I loved it), but because I was actually starting to become claustrophobic and panicked while reading it.  I swear -- a book that can mirror the feel of what's happening in the text in the mind of the reader is just too good not to read. It won't be for everyone, since there are no easy answers here, but for those who like an intellectual challenge and who like to put their brains to work, it's beyond excellent.

Very highly recommended.

Requiem at Rogano, by Stephen Knight - in which I had great fun and did a serious double take

9781943910663

Valancourt Books, 2017

originally published 1979

301 pp

Another fine release from Valancourt, Requiem at Rogano is a novel that you may think you've read before as you get further into it, but trust me, that just isn't the case.  While a number of authors in the 1970s produced something similar along these lines (I won't say but you'll know what I mean after reading it), this one stands on its own as something unique. As mentioned on the back-cover blurb, the reviewer from The Financial Times wrote about this novel that he can "recommend this to all who enjoy literate crime fiction," a sentiment I share. I'll also add that not only is it literate, but it is twisty to the point where every time I thought I had it all figured out, something happened that nixed my solution and sent me off in another direction entirely. The light bulb only went on in my head during the final moments of the story, just before the reveal.   Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when a writer comes up with a mystery story that I can't solve, well, to me he or she has done his or her job, and has done it well.  These days it takes a lot to find such a writer of mysteries since I've been reading them since I was just a wee girl -- usually I pick up on what's going on and have to settle for waiting not so patiently while the crimesolver person catches up.  It's frustrating, but happily, that's not an issue here. Thank goodness. 

It's 1902, and we are in London. The newspaper headlines are filled with reports of a strange series of murders done by a figure the police have dubbed "The Deptford Strangler," that are leaving police baffled. In the meantime, because of the police regulations requiring an officer to retire at age sixty, Reginald Arthur Brough has been made to take a retirement he's not quite ready for. He'd "tried to make the best of it," but so far, it's not been a happy time.  Things begin to look up when his nephew, Nicholas Calvin, writes to inquire whether or not he'd like to help him with a History of Murder that he's writing. He also notes that he has "stumbled on one case the like of which you've never seen," one that has brought him to Italy.  Brough doesn't take long deciding yes or no -- it is a way out of the "mental stagnation" of retirement, which he sees as a "slow march to death."  However, when he meets Nicholas later, Brough is disappointed in learning that Nicholas wants to "abandon" the project.  In its place he wants to "write a book on one single crime and its aftermath," and relates to his uncle the bizarre story of a series of murders that took place in the Italian town of Rogano in the fifteenth century, complete with strange figures in black clothing, an abbey built on sheer cliffs of solid granite, and the Inquisition.  So at this point I'm hooked like a fish and it's only page 15. After that, it just gets better, as it slowly dawns on the reader that, à la back-cover blurb, the pattern of the 1454 Rogano murders is "identical" to that of the string of murders happening in the present day.  The question of how this is possible sets Brough and Nicholas on the path of a bizarre journey that only gets stranger as time goes on.

There is a LOT more, which I'm not going to reveal here, because as I said a few days ago when talking about  Uncle Silas, the less prospective readers know about this book going into it the better.  While there are several reviews scattered here and there in the cyberworld, my advice would be to restrain yourselves from reading them until you've turned the last page. It is a mega-twisty book with a number of big surprises on the way to the ending, and trust me -- you don't want to know too much about it beforehand other than what you can glean from the back-cover blurb, which is pretty much all I've said about it here. Read spoilers at your peril -- I didn't and I'm very happy I didn't know anything beforehand to ruin the fun I had with this book. 

What I will say is that when I got to the end, I had to completely re-evaluate all that I'd just read.  The conclusion was a downright shocker and so I went racing back through the novel a second time, at which point I discovered exactly how truly ingenious a book Requiem at Rogano really is and how well the author plied his craft here.  And, just in case anyone's wondering why  I'm posting about this book here and not on the crime page of my reading journal, well, there is a definite reason, but I'm not going to give away anything except to say trust me, it definitely belongs here. Plus, if it's read as just a crime thriller, well, that's just wrong. 

James - you picked a good one. Thanks!!!! 

one of my favorite Gothic novels of all time: Uncle Silas, by J.S. Le Fanu

0486217159
Dover, 1966 ed.
originally published 1864
436 pp

paperback

"Fly the fangs of Belisarius!"

There are certain books in my library with which I've fallen in love -- the books I've been dragging around with me from move to move that I would never let out of my sight, and this one is pretty much in the top tier of those.  I decided to reread it a few weeks ago when someone online was asking about a Victorian mystery and this one popped into my head.  Well, there's that, plus the fact that many months ago, I'd bought a dvd of the old BBC adaptation of Uncle Silas called "The Dark Angel"  and really wanted to watch it, but I wanted to wait until I'd reread the book.  I have two different editions:  Penguin  ( ISBN 9780140437461)  and this one from Dover, but I had just finished a Dover reprint of another book from 1827 and decided to continue the Dover run.

Since I'd already read this novel, I didn't skip the intro this time, and there was a particular paragraph that caught my eye, so much so that I'm putting it in bold print here:

"Well, you now have Uncle Silas in your hands. If you've not read it before, I envy you. You are about to have a first-time reading experience which, I suspect, you will never forget."

That is certainly the truth -- I remember the very first time I read it, sending pages flip flip flipping in my desire to make sure that my beloved, sweet Maud Ruthyn was going to be okay at the end, pounding heart, knotted stomach, and the feeling that everything else could just go to hell for a little while until I finished the book.  This time through, since enough years had passed since I'd first read it, I can say that the flip flip flipping, the pounding heart, knotted stomach, and the feeling that everything else could just go to hell for a little while until I finished the book happened all over again.  What's changed is that this time, unlike the last time x number of years ago,  I got much more of a sense of what lies beneath, and of just how near-perfectly  this book was written. It was this novel that started me on Le Fanu's  fiction, and afterwards,  I bought and devoured all of his gothic-ish novels (that have also moved with me from place to place), then started collecting his ghostly and other supernatural tales. I haven't read them all yet, but it's comforting to know that should I have a desire to do so, they're there, waiting for me.

This post is a huge departure from my norm, since I won't give up a single detail here, nor will I provide even the slightest hints, because first-time readers should stay away from anything about Uncle Silas  that will reveal its contents  either before or during your reading of this novel. Do so at your own peril: knowing what happens ahead of time will completely lessen the impact that the book will have on you and the fun is in the building of suspense and in getting caught up in its atmosphere as it gets darker and darker and darker,  until in its final moments when you can finally let out all of the tension you've been holding inside.  If you're not knotted with tension as you read this book, there is seriously something wrong with you. Seriously.

It is and will remain one of my favorite books ever, and I can absolutely recommend it. Unlike my usual practice, I won't go into what lies underneath its surface, but just so you know, there is a LOT happening that careful readers will be able to discern. Honestly, it's killing me to keep quiet about it, but as I said, not a word.   Just a couple of things: 1) do not gloss over the role of the Swedenborgian religion here -- it's very, very important, and 2) don't skim through either the descriptions of the landscape or the main houses in this story -- Le Fanu is an absolute master of weaving such details into his work and they only serve to augment what he's trying to do.  Other than that, my only advice is to let the book carry you away from the real world and to have tons of fun with it.

*********

Now - let's talk adaptations for a moment, neither of which should be viewed until you've finished the book.   As I noted earlier, I recently bought a screen adaptation of this novel called "The Dark Angel,"

which stars Peter O'Toole as Uncle Silas, and he's pretty damn creepy in his role. This adaptation tends to overdo it with the more nightmarish/surrealistic effects which were probably great at the time (1988)  but which now seem kind of silly and tend to lessen the suspense a bit here and there, but at least it adheres to the novel quite nicely with only a few changes here and there.  The second adaptation (1947)  is called "Uncle Silas,"  which quite frustratingly changes the story almost completely.  However, what both adaptations do well is choosing the right person to play the role of my favorite, most horrific character in this book --  Maud's governess Madame de la Rougierre.   While the actress does a great job in the 1947 version,  Jane Lapotaire does an even more freakish portrayal than her counterpart in the earlier film.

from myreviewer.com

Honestly, I didn't think that could be possible.

Both have their merits, but my money's on "The Dark Angel."

as we venture into the realm of the fays: Bluebirds, by Catulle Mendès

9781943813254
Snuggly Books, 2017
originally published as Les oiseaux bleus, 1888
translated from the French by Brian Stableford
163 pp



"...who would assume the task of writing fairy tales if he did not have the right to transform, in the course of his tales, the most hideous individuals into young ladies dazzling with beauty and adornments?" -- 110



I just loved this collection of French tales  -- it's one of those "sorry, I'm out of the real world right now so please leave a message" kind of books that I look forward to finding and only every so often do.

In describing this book to others, I've said that it's a collection of "fairy" tales for adults, but that description isn't quite accurate as I embarrassingly discovered after finishing the book while reading the introduction that talks about the evolution of the French conte.  For our purposes (beware of what's coming next  - I love reading about the history of literature so it will be a moment before I actually get to the book),  in the seventeenth century, a new "fad" was created when

"collections of reconfigured folktales and imitations thereof began to appear in several European nations," 

and became a hit with the "literary salons associated with some of the leading ladies of Louis XIV."  Authors of this sort of  "salon literature"

"deliberately employed and exaggerated the elements of the merveilleux in such traditional tales, in calculated flagrant defiance of the dawning 'Age of Enlightenment' that ruled such material superstitious, obsolete and unworthy of credence."

One particular "promoter of salon literature" of the time was the Baroness d'Aulnoy, who, in the same year that Charles Perrault published his Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Tales of Mother Goose),  put together a collection of tales called Les Contes de fées.   This little factoid is noteworthy since (and I swear I'm getting around to my point about wrongly labeling this book a collection of fairy tales in case you've wondered where the hell I'm going with all of this)  as Stableford goes on to say that

"The nearest equivalent to the French word féerie is "enchantment," and fées are, strictly speaking, enchantresses (as in the enchantress of Arthurian legend known in English as Morgan le Fay), but the title of Madame d' Aulnoy's first collection was translated into English as 'fairy tales,' thus foisting that label on an entire genre of subsequent English fiction, most of whose included stories do not, in fact, feature 'fairies' as prevously defined and deployed by such influential domestic writers as William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser." 

He also notes that while Mendès' stories often feature "individuals very similar to the fairies of previous English literature and art," the "genre defined by Madame d'Aulnoy," became adapted for children's literature. The truth is though that "the production of such tales in the French salons was intended for the use of adults."  Finally getting down to where I said I'd be going, the stories in this book are less "fairy" tale than as Stableford puts it, "fakeloristic contes" and a "specialized collection of pastiche folktales"  which happen to involve "fays" in most cases, and trust me, there are several here that are certainly not meant to be bedtime reading for children.

Because there are twenty-seven of these little contes to be found here, there is no way to quickly go through each one, and I probably wouldn't anyway since the joy is in the reading and I wouldn't want to mess that up for anyone considering this book.   There are quite a few that made me laugh -- offering just two examples here, "The Dreaming Beauty,"  a sort of riff on "Sleeping Beauty," carries the traditional tale to a new level as a prince gets his comeuppance after waking the sleeping princess; "The Bonnet Collector" gave me a serious case of the giggles after reading Stableford's footnote about the French usage of the term "flinging (or throwing) one's cap or bonnet over the windmill," which was likely not taken from Don Quixote.  Then there are the darker ones in which I could clearly see elements of later Decadent fiction, including "The Lucky Find," in which Amour and Beauty step into a property shop to find something they've lost.  And, while they're all wonderful little tales, to add to the few mentioned above, I did have my favorites  -- "The Beauty of the World" (in which the author makes a great point), "The Maladroit Wish," in the vein of "be careful what you wish for...", and "Isoline-Isolin," the nature of which which I won't even hint at, and "The Three Good Fays," another one with a beyond-true ironic ending.

There is great wisdom to be discovered in the sheer irony of these tales, so even though they're short, they're also quite complex, deserving of a slow, careful read.  I just love when I find works like this, and this time, it's left me wanting more of the same.  Hint hint, Snuggly.

Highly, highly recommended, it's absolutely beautiful. My copy came from Snuggly, so a huge  merci bien, mes amis to the great people there.

indie author spotlight: In which "being dead is just full of surprises": Down Solo, by Earl Javorsky

9781611881769

Story Plant, 2014

202 pp

kindle version 

I feel so badly right now -- I had read this novel at the beginning of March and meant to post about it, but completely spaced.  Normally after I finish a book, it goes into a designated basket  next to my desk and then as I have time, I grab a book from the top and write a post about it. Since this one was on my Ipad that I couldn't just throw in the basket, well, out of sight, out of mind, another reason I don't particularly care for e-books. So, to author Earl Javorsky, mea culpa, my many many many huge gigantor apologies. 

Down Solo is a crossbreed -- it's  hardboiled crime mixed with pulp mixed with the supernatural.  At the beginning of this book, PI Charlie Miner thinks he "must have blacked out for a bit" after a bullet had entered his skull, but to his surprise, he wakes up "naked on a gurney" in the morgue.  It's not a mistake -- Charlie is quite dead, having been killed,  then tagged as an "unidentified male."  He discovers that he can not only "disengage" from his body and roam around, but that by returning, he is able to reanimate himself.  So he does what any normal naked dead guy would do -- steals the clothes from his dead skinhead morgue companion and walks out. First things first -- he wants to discover why he was killed and who did it.  Thinking he'll find the answers by looking through the files of the five current cases he was working on before someone put a bullet in his brain, file number four suddenly "sings a tune" in his head -- and we're off on an incredibly strange but fast-paced adventure that begins with a gorgeous woman and ends with a very big bang. 

Never a dull moment in this book -- drugs, pursuits, sex and a lot of bullets --  all of the standard fare of an fast-paced hardboiled thriller find their way into this novel.  While it's a story of retribution, which Charlie learns "is allowed," at the same time it's a story of redemption and unlike a lot of authors who play with what I call "woo-woo" elements in a crime novel, the author does a great job with the story and especially with his main character. For a dead man, Charlie turns out to be quite human, especially when it comes to his daughter, who obviously doesn't know he's no longer among the living.  There is a lot of "if only" thinking on Charlie's part, and also a lot of pain, but these sad moments are offset by the snarky humor thrown in here. There is a very funny scene, for example, where he tries to convince a priest that he's dead, and messes with the poor man's head to prove it.  In general, the story is very well done and while I'm not usually a big fan of action-packed thrillers, adding the character of dead Charlie into the mix kept me reading.  This one I'd certainly recommend -- it's just plain fun.