With The King in the
Golden Mask, Wakefield Press continues its endeavor to publish the works of
Marcel Schwob with a volume of fantastic and macabre tales. The author spins stories
of violence and mild sexual transgression that are divided between those
derived from actual historical places or events and others that are pure
fantasy. There’s enough leprosy and
mutilation to keep things interesting and, on the whole, the book is skewed
more towards the lurid than The Book of
Monelle. The stories have that
quaint poeticism that one finds in certain fin
de siècle authors – they are nicely translated by Kit Schluter with an
appropriate dreamlike quality, and are quite enjoyable, if not particularly
memorable.
Also published by Wakefield, just this year, Imaginary Lives resembles – and was an
inspiration for – Borges’ wonderful Universal
History of Infamy. Not all
of the 24 personages* in Schwob’s fictionalized biographies are degenerates and
reprobates (Pocahontas, of all people, appears in the mix), but it’s not giving
anything away to say that sad, unfortunate ends are the norm here. In a few pages each, Schwob tells the story
of a number of famous, infamous, and obscure characters from antiquity through the Renaissance and up into the 18th Century (he has a particular thing for pirates, it appears). This is
a worthy addition to Wakefield’s Schwob project.
Very much in the vein of the aforementioned cruel tales is
Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace in Rome,
which I read some months ago but neglected to mention here. It is the unfortunate tale of a 17th Century Italian engraver, who bears hideous facial scars as a result of
an ill-fated romantic encounter, excellently told by a modern master and
published by Wakefield in 2016.
Note: I’ve decided to revive my practice of providing Amazon
product links, as decent bookstores can be hard to find, and the few loose
cents dropped into my Amazon account every year or so is a good reminder to not
give up my day job. If you are fortunate
enough to live in a place with a local bookstore brave enough to stock these
titles in the vain hope that some ne’er-do-well will wander in looking for an
intelligent, yet lurid, read (as Malvern Books in Austin does), then by all
means patronize them.
* Just for the hell of it, here is the list:
Empedocles (Supposed God)
Herostratus (Incendiary)
Crates (Cynic)
Septima (Enchantress)
Lucretius (Poet)
Clodia (Licentious Matron)
Petronius (Novelist)
Suffrah (Geomancer)
Fra Dolcino (Heretic)
Cecco Angiolieri (Hateful Poet)
Paolo Uccello (Painter)
Nicolas Loyseleur (Judge)
Katherine the Lacemaker (Lady of the Night)
Alain the Kind (Soldier )
Gabriel Spenser (Actor)
Pocahontas (Princess)
Cyril Tourneur (Tragic Poet)
William Phips (Treasure Hunter)
Captain Kidd (Pirate)
Walter Kennedy (Illiterate Pirate)
Major Stede Bonner (Pirate by Temperament)
Messrs. Burke and Hare (Murderers)
