Marcel Schwob (1867–1905)

The immortal testament to the young girl who tells you that when you let her go, if you lose her, she will come again; and if you lose her again, she will come again; and if you keep losing her, as you must, she'll keep coming back, as she must; so you remain connected (in the manner of a kinetoscope) and you can't stay together but you can gently play together; and even when something called TB has seemingly taken her where she can never come back; she can come back; and does.

Beautifully completed by the Translator's Afterword (thanks to Kit Schluter).… (mehr)

This short but impressive and important work makes Marcel Schwob a sort of fin de siecle decadent successor to Dante and Colonna, constructing a significant mystical text in memory of the lost Beatrice-Polia-Monelle. Wakefield Press, the publisher of the 2012 English translation, says that it was adopted as the "unofficial bible of the French symbolist movement." The book is divided into three sections, each in a different style.

"The Voice of Monelle" is the first part, consisting of spiritual imperatives. It reads almost like Kahlil Gibran on an absinthe bender. It is excellent stuff for anyone who wants another installment of Aleister Crowley's "Liber Cheth," although Schwob was of course writing seventeen years before Crowley's reception of that "secret of the Holy Graal."

"The Sisters of Monelle" are a collection of narrative vignettes, closer in form to Schwob's previously-published work in The King in the Golden Mask. But these all feature lost or wayward girls for protagonists. Each story is named for a moral or psychological quality, such as "The Perverse," "The Disappointed," "The Faithful," and "The Numb," suggesting that they are allegories in which each story's girl represents a different plight of the unenlightened soul.

"Monelle" per se is the third part, consisting of six short chapters in the voice of an unnamed narrator, and this section is presumably the one that draws most directly on Schwob's personal memory of the girl Louise whom he had lost to tuberculosis in 1893. Even so, it is surreal and repeatedly floats across an ambiguous threshold of mortality.

Translator Kit Schluter's afterword contains both a general biography of Schwob and a more particular study of his relationship with Louise, including a facsimile of the sole surviving correspondence from her to the writer, and an account of the composition of Monelle and her book.… (mehr)

This is perhaps the hardest book I've ever had to review. If you just read the stories, they are entertaining enough--violent, tragic, strange, and so on. But since they are about real people, it is hard to judge what the author's intent was. This is especially true since most of them are obscure or ancient and my education never taught me about them, so I can't appreciate the alterations Schwob is introducing into their lives. I ended up looking at Wikipedia for many of these to see what the real story was. Schwob's versions tend to make things more definitive than they were. According to the introduction to a more modern version that I read a bit of, Schwob tends to focus on secondary players--such as the actor Ben Jonson killed rather than Jonson himself, or on Joan of Arc's false confessor. Still, the overall purpose eludes me.… (mehr)