Marcel Schwob (1867–1905)

History for arts sake? Frida Kahlo read this while convalescing from the accident that shaped the rest of her life. I read a biography of Kahlo while convalescing from my life and thus discovered Schwob.

In 10-page biographies, Schwob depicts "the unique existences of ... priests, criminals, or nobodies." Each is treated with an artistic verve that belies the notion that "minute records of great men or epochs or events of the past are not especially needed." Why say what's been said before? show more And yet, each of these tales is spun such that one may take them as a warning: beware that for which you ask! In describing one of his subjects, the painter Paolo Uccello, Schwob wrote, he "was not concerned with the reality of things but their multiplicity and the infinity of their lines." So, too Swchob, who chose for us,

Empedocles, Supposed God
Erostat, Incendiary
Crates, Cynic
Septima, Enchantress
Lucretius, Poet
Clodia, Impure Woman
Petronius, Romancer
Sufrah, Geomancer
Fra Dolcino, Heretic
Cecco Angiolieri, Poet of Hate
Paolo Uccello, Painter
Nicholas Loyseleur, Judge
Katherine the Lacemaker, Girl of the Streets
Alain the Gentle, Soldier
Gabriel Spencer, Actor
Pocahontas, Princess
Cyril Tourneur, Tragic Poet
William Phips, Treasure Hunter
Captain Kidd, Pirate
Walter Kennedy, Unlettered Pirate
Major Stede-Bonnet, Pirate by Fancy
Burke and Hare, Assassins

Among them you're sure to find a kindred spirit--or hopefully not. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less