The Book of Monelle

 

The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficcial bible of the French Symbolist movement," claims the back-cover copy of the (always amazing and criminally under-rated - and, incidentally, publisher of one of my favorite books of recent years) Wakefield Press edition of The Book of Monelle. One can easily see the segue from the artistic themes of the Symbolists (particularly the Belgian contingent) to Schwob's work here. This might also have something to do with the mood and themes of his short story collection The King in the Golden Mask, so, perhaps my artistic synesthesia bleeds into one morass of mythicaly-ethereal dream oceans.

I ascertain that one of the main ways that Monelle fed the symbolists was through a sort of literary sleight-of-hand, in which the title of the book's sections intentionally put one in an emotional state, ready to "receive" what the title had to offer, only to be slipped a story that contrasted with the story's title, sometimes directly opposing it, at other times, skewing meanings in unpredictable ways. This is particularly true in the first section "The Sisters of Monelle". For instance, the story "The Voluptuous" is anything but sexually attractive, while "The Savage" ends on a note of purely innocent love. In some ways, I see this baiting as a very mild precursor to what the dadaists and surrealists would take to extremes later on.

The second section, the actual "Book of Monelle," is a logically-slippery slope, a time-less (meaning that time has become a sort of stew with bits and pieces of past, present, and future swirling before the reader) dreamstate or fugue. Only on reading the translator's notes did I realize that Schwob had written the book using his lover, Louise (surname unknown), a young woman, likely a prostitute, with whom he had fallen in love before she was riddled through and killed by tuberculosis, becoming, over time, a sort of saintly figure in Schwob's mythology. Of course, this was deeply affecting to Schwob, and one can feel the emotional tug of "Monelle" throughout. We can feel Schwob's sorrow and his longing, especially in the pleading of Monelle's suitor to stay with or return to him and the children (not their children, but any child that is trying to escape the entrapment of adulthood and its banalities). So, besides the intellectual and philosophical exercise of the symbolism herein, we are swept up in a powerfully-emotional, softly-turning whirlwind, pushed aloft, then dropped to the depths of sorrow. It is a moving journey, and not one to be soon forgotten.

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