Maurice Sandoz seems to have been a fairly popular and successful writer in his day, with his work translated into several languages, but books now seem to be remembered only for the Dali illustrations, which have made them highly collectable.

"Fantastic Memories" is a slim volume of rather fragmentary tales, presented as reminiscences of a Decadent aristocrat. The stories are slight in themselves, but are well-written, perverse and deeply odd, with a uniquely strange flavour that has led me to search out all of Sandoz' other fiction. Sandoz, a scion of the pharmaceuticals dynasty who supplied legal LSD to the medical profession into the mid-sixties, seems to have been a complex character, from the scant information I have been able to glean from the site of the charitable foundation that bears his name. I'd like to know more. ( )