Malpertuis

Jean Ray was a contemporary of Lovecraft and the other Weird Fiction regulars, but his style and sensibility was far more literary, looking back to Poe, contemporary with Grabinski, and looking ahead to Aickman and even Barker. Last year, I read his first two collections of short stories, but Malpertuis, widely regarded as his masterpiece, is absolutely phenomenal and on a higher level. It drips with style and atmosphere, and Ray's use of mythology is original and unexpected. There are also strong elements of surrealism present here, and the shifting narrative voices create something akin to a horror story written by Borges. Read as little as possible about it, and just dive in.

It's always refreshing to read weird fiction that's truly WEIRD, as opposed to just about strange things happening. Jean Ray's major novel delivers a particularly strange haunted house story, one that increases in surrealism and metaphysics until it ends up taking apart the whole genre and rebuilding it into something else. Ray's language is also wonderful, coating the house in dripping shadows and flickering lights, and his agility of tone between parody, disorientation, and genuinely scary stuff is really impressive. An absolute banger, though probably not for everyone.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1264067.html

This is regarded as the great work of Belgian fantasy (at least in the novel form: there are loads of Belgian comics and films with sfnal content). It's quite difficult to get hold of and I eventually picked up a copy of the 1998 Atlas Press translation on eBay. It appears at first to be about the peculiar inhabitants of the house of Malpertuis, in a city which is presumably Ghent in the dying days of Francophone supremacy; but in fact it turns into a peculiar confrontation between the organised Catholic church and the gods of ancient Greece. My edition makes the inevitable link with H.P. Lovecraft; I would add James Stephens' The Crock of Gold as a potential source, and I wonder if Neil Gaiman show more drew on it, consciously or not, for American Gods (and likewise, for the nested narrative structure, David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas). Ray is not quite as terrifying as Lovecraft (though fairly gruesome in places), and he is certainly not as cheerful as Stephens, but he does add a certain level of surrealist incomprehensibility to the mix that is appropriate for a slightly older contemporary of Magritte, who like Magritte stayed in Belgium and wrote this book during the German occupation. Certainly an essential read for sf fans interested in Belgium, or Belgians interested in literary sf. show less

Malpertuisis is a "Romantic grotesque". It's a really, really bizarre book. Imagine Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables on acid. About half way through the book I was thinking, "What the fuck? Has this guy been taking crazy pills?" There is a plot ... sort of... but mostly it's a strange montage of images and events. However, by the end of the book the events and their delirious quality started to make sense. The book is a mystery of sorts.

*spoiler alert*

The basic plot is a group of friends and relatives of a dying man, Cassave, are summoned to his dark and sprawling mansion called "Malpertuis" (like something out of The Fall of the House of Usher) to hear his last wishes. He bequeaths all of his enormous fortune to those show more present on one condition: they must spend the rest of their days living within the walls of Malpertuis. Do to the vast inheritance they're all to receive they unanimously decide to move to the mansion.

The estate is a cold, dark, and dreary place. Jean Ray goes out of his way describing it's gothic features. Then things really get bizarre. The story is told from the point of view of a young man, Jean-Jacques. The events unfold with a dream-like quality. You can't tell whether things are really happening or imaginary. It's like reading the narrative of a crazy person, but it works! As aforementioned, most of the book I was really confused until I found out the underlying cause of the strange events.

Basically Cassave was once a powerful occultist and alchemist. He discovered that many the ancient gods still lived, but in a very weakened form. He finds the real Mt. Olympus and takes the surviving gods as captives. Most only have the faintest traces of their powers, if at all, and are existing in a state of amnesia. He brings them back to Europe and creates identities for them as friends and family. They've forgotten who they once were all together -- well, most of them anyway. Cassave realized it's in the god's nature to play out dramas which is why he has them all come together to live within Malpertuis where they can unknowingly act out predestined fates. Since they're all living in a non-human reality things like time and logic don't always flow the way they would for us. Hence the dream-like Symbolist style, as gods are really nothing more than symbols of forces anyway.

Only later when you start to put 2 and 2 together and figure out who each character really is in the Greek pantheon does the actions and events begin to make sense. The book can be read on many different levels. Everything is meant to symbolize something. Malpertuis itself is a manifestation of Pergatory or perhaps even Tartarus.

Overall it was good; however, I spent a good 2/3 of the novel utterly confused, and that started to get old. Sure, it all made sense at the end, but there should have been more clues earlier on so that I could have picked up the symbolism. I really had no idea they were gods until near the end of the book. Some parts are still confusing to me. Apparently the lead narrator (there are a few different narrators) Jean-Jacques is a Hercules-like character, half mortal and half god. However he's a new hero (and Cassave's grandson). He's thrown into the drama to fulfill his newly created destiny. show less

An astonishing post-modern Gothic novel that has to be read more than once, seriously, to be understood and appreciated. When I say you must re-read it, you must; you will simply not "get" it all if you don't.

Brush-up on your Bullfinch too.

I just didn't get the point of the whole thing, and while the atmosphere was creepy nothing at all happened and I got bored of it.

E’ stato il sogno o la veglia a mostrarmi la verita’?
(Blavatzsky, p. 99)


… e’ un folle colui che pretende di spiegare il sogno.
(p. 105)

Il confronto tra Jean Ray e Lovecraft non regge il confronto (chiaramente a favore di Lovecraft)...

… nel weird non tutti i mostri vengono per nuocere. Al punto che, quando il weird raggiunge le sue vette migliori, puo’ essere al contempo horror, fantascienza e fantasy. (Ivo Torello citato da Giuseppe Lippi, p. 166)

Costruite tutte le chiese che volete,
disseminate pure le strade di cappelle
e di croci: non impedirete agli dei
dell’antica Tessaglia di riapparire
attraverso i canti dei poeti e i libri
dei sapienti.
(Hawthorne, p. 11)

Devo presentare Malpertuis ed eccomi colto da una strana show more impotenza.
(p. 36) show less