M.I. Gelb

This tiny little tragedy is an interesting piece in Schwob's oeuvre, as it's quite difficult for me not to read it as both a coda and rejoinder to The Book of Monelle, especially given Schwob was reportedly very frustrated at being primary known as the author of the latter. Like Monelle, this is a bleak, polyvocal tale of metaphysical child suffering. Here, though, it's vastly more nihilist. No longer do children, in their innocence and ephemeralness, exist to teach lessons or remind adults of something or bring other children to safety. Instead they exist purely as strange, innocent beings with terrible, senseless fates at the hands of adults and the uncaring cruelty of nature/G-d. Schwob mentions on the first page the disgust at people who cut up kids and put them on display to provoke sympathy and that absolutely is something I read as a critique of his own writing.

Also, interestingly, Schwob was (as far as I know) an assimilated Jew and there's a funny dynamic here where he has a sort of fascinated outsider perspective on both Christianity and Islam, but Judaism is completely missing.

All-in-all, a book that's very slight and thus doesn't have a huge impact, but which is a well-wrought tragedy and is particularly of interest for folks who care about Schwob as a writer writ large.

Note: This book is as weird about Islam and "the east" as you'd expect a book from a European about the crusades with white as the primary symbol to be.

The postmodern/experimental detective stori is kind of its own form with a pretty distinct history, stretching from weird fiction and Agatha Christie through Paul Auster and Twin Peaks to the present day. Well, this might be the best entry in this subgenre I've read. Vacated Landscape is a novel that I can best describe as "impressive," as the degree to which it pulls everything off really blows me away.

Firstly, the structure of this book is really interesting, Gormley is spot-on when he describes it as both a mobius strip and a fractal. The themes and narrative style of the novel echo through doublings and scalings-up-and-down. It feels as if you can look at the story from any level and angle and find that interpretation reflected infinitely through the rest of the story. Adding to this is Lahougue's excellent prose, which is both evocative and very funny, as our narrator hems and haws and writes incredibly convoluted sentences that read like a parody of Proust. Which, of course, reflect the larger structure of the novel.

Secondly, this book feels like it has a much deeper engagement with themes of reading, writing, and desire than similar works. The protagonist is an editor (of children's books) and this mean that the novel is less about what it means to write and more about what it means to edit, to seek to perfect a narrative, and so on. So many of the doublings and reflections in this book are through varying levels of incompleteness - such as two identical houses, one of which is ruined, or miniature reproductions of paintings displayed in another city. Through this we're given this really ambivalent, complicated meditation on how you can engage with incompleteness and perfection, narrativization and humanity. In fact, one of the more mundane readings of this book is that it's essentially about a man ruining his life because of his inability to think of people as people instead of as characters that point to a higher truth.

That brings me to the thing that really surprised me and is one of the elements that pushes it to five stars: it's a lot less weird about women than most stories of this sort. Very common in postmodernism, especially of the mystery kind, is the child-woman or madonna-whore sort of character. A woman who, in her womanly naivete, her sexuality, her innocence, whatever, is a lead into a truth that the male protagonist with all his cultural baggage can't access by himself. As I said in my review of Book of Illusions: the idea that women are a sort of lever to help men get their lives together. In this book it feels like Lahougue tackles this mindset quite directly. The second half of the book is highly concerned with the protagonist's love affair with an odd woman. However, instead of her helping him access something he can't, it all falls apart at the attempt. The narrator tries to get all the mysteries and fears of the story to coalesce in the identity of his girlfriend and the result is that it ruins their relationship as he becomes more and more obsessed with the answers she represents, instead of the person she is. It's cool and very refreshing.

And, as icing on the cake, the ending is absolutely killer - another thing this genre tends to struggle with. This book blew me away and I really hope more Lahougue makes it to English.

Wakefield Press do a lot of good stuff, but in terms of "contributions to English literature" or whatever, the translation of Marcel Schwob's oeuvre might be the most important. He is a really singular, really powerful, really influential writer and I am glad to be able to properly read his work.

While The Man in the Golden Mask isn't quite as devastating as The Book of Monelle, it is very much of a piece with it. If Monelle could be said to establish a metaphysics of loss, this book forms a history of the same. Schwob's stories are largely odd little vignettes, coming off somewhere between historical anecdotes and folk tales, and they are cut through with an emotional struggle with loss, alienation, and death. In fact, while the back of the book defines these as cruel, the thing that is really striking is that they're kind of the opposite. No matter who he is writing, a knight or a thief or a witch or a dancer, Schwob is deeply empathetic towards them. His premise, to me, is that regardless of how good or bad of a person you are, death and loss comes for you, and it is both sad and beautiful that that is one of the great shared experiences of humanity. This is especially notable to me in the post-decadent and symbolist scene, which could often be intensely cruel for the sake of transgression.

I won't do the usual thing of talking about each story individually. They are all very short and, like Monelle, give the impression of this book being one unified Thing, more than a collection of disparate stories. I will list some of my favorites, though: The King in the Golden Mask, The Terrestrial Fire, The Faulx-Visaiges, The Milesian Virgins, The Talking Machine, The Flute, The Blue Country, Bargette (included in The Book of Monelle as "The Disappointed").

A powerful and striking book from a unique writer. Should be essential if you're into turn-of-the-century literature, Symbolism, or Surrealism.

Wakefield's edition of her early story collection, The Arthritic Grasshopper, is excellent even by their standards, with cool original art and a great introduction about Prassinos in relation to the sexist surrealist milieu by Bo Ruberg of all people.

the thing that strikes me with her earliest stories, which she started at 14, is how imagistic they are. People reading often comment on how full of non-sequiturs and narratives that don't make sense, but that's because they're not narrative. It's like Prassinos is writing ekphrasis of non-existent Varo pieces and viewed in that light I think her writing isn't all that difficult to parse, which certainly doesn't mean it's not really interesting.