NOTE: First Impressions is my name for posts where I just started a book and immediately want to put down fresh thoughts about what strikes me about the style, the story, etc. These are not meant to be full-blown reviews, and so I will be at leisure to post more of them without quite having to work myself up to writing a more serious analysis.
I just dipped my toe into the Fantastic Tales of Beroalde de Verville, translated by the horror writer Arthur Machen, and they are extremely amusing.
One part of the charm here is randomness; Verville is just an affable weirdo (and we all love those.) Some characteristic quotes:
“Thus it came to pass that I sat there, and as honorably as any man, since I have a tail, and without a tail no one can sit down in honourable company.”
“We proceeded to dig our graves with our teeth.”
“Enough of this; our pies are baked in another oven.”
The secret of the joke often lies in this: every single line has the tone of serious speechifying/rhetoric, except the actual content of the speechifying clauses has been replaced by random nonsensical pseudo arguments. It sounds like this is leading somewhere, but Beroalde is actually intentionally leading us nowhere (or into pointless logical pretzels, as the case may be.)
At other times though, Verville flashes an extremely sharp satirical pen, full of historical allusions and jokes. The translator, for example, claims that the book’s numerous historical personages have nothing to do with their real-life counterparts, but that’s not quite true; oftentimes, the joke is a parody or absurdity which plays upon the personages actual character but takes it to extremes, or alternatively, completely subverts it. It is the incongruity of Democritus and Aristotle engaging in a scholarly dialogue about ass-wiping that makes it funny. This book kind of reminds me a little of Maldoror by the Comte de Leautremont, another proto-Surrealist text.
I was originally made aware of the book and its author when I saw it written up in George Saintsbury’s A Short History of French Literature. (Saintsbury describes the book as an inferior imitation of Rabelais, but I find the jokes here to be perhaps more scholarly than the Simpsons-like bawdiness the former indulges.) I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Arthur Machen, whose classic novella “The Great God Pan” I was familiar with, had early in his career been a translator of both the Heptameron of Margaret of Navarre and this book. The book doesn’t seem available anywhere online, so I had to borrow a copy from the UC library. To my delight, this 1923 private printing is signed by Machen.
Aw no! Ye commentes be closed.