Tag Archives: Marcel Schwob

The Book of Monelle

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Book of Monelle [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Marcel Schwob, trans Kit Schulter.

Scwob Schulter The Book of Monelle

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.

The King in the Golden Mask

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob, translated and afterword by Kit Schluter.

Schwob Schluter The King in the Golden Mask

The Wakefield Press edition of The King in the Golden Mask is the first complete English translation of this 1892 collection of short stories in French by Marcel Schwob. Translator Kit Schluter provides an afterword which positions the book in Schwob’s oeuvre and traces the author’s impressive subsequent influence on aesthetic movements and literary writers around the world. Each story is dedicated to one of Schwob’s contemporaries, a range of figures including Anatole France and Oscar Wilde.

The twenty-one stories are all vivid and well-suited to our short 21st-century attention spans. They generally begin in media res and often conclude without much plot resolution, so that they tend to fall towards the vignette within the spectrum of forms. Settings are mostly historical, and the language is often opaquely archaic, an effect that Schluter has been at some effort to sustain. Principal characters range among “lepers, embalming women, eunuchs, murderers, demoniacs, and pirates” and others (3). As Schwob avers in his foreword, the mask is a recurrent (if not ubiquitous) trope among the stories, and he intimates a sort of Derridean trace unifying the superficially fragmented book.

Favorites for me included the eschatological “Terrestrial Fire,” the medieval documentation of “The Sabbat at Mofflaines,” and the science-fictional “Talking Machine.”