The Beauty of the Death Cap

 

The Beauty of the Death Cap by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze


I admit that I have a certain soft-spot for "plotless" books. And while The Beauty of the Death Cap isn't completely plotless, the plot is a mere wisp, a skeleton or an apparition, if you will. But it's barely necessary in this book.

The central conceit of the book is the gradual peeling away of layers around the ultimately sociopathic Nikonor (a name of a "certain Slavic, vaguely menacing quality"), his various career pursuits, love of mycology, and his paranoia, engendered by his twin sister. This is all done in a tongue in cheek manner, but by the end, we realize that the tongue is boring completely through the cheek and exposing a bloody mess. It's not a horror book, nor a psychological thriller; no, this one really does defy categorization. You hear that about many books, but this one means it. I can't think of any subgenre in which this book comfortably sits outside of grim humor, and that's not really a genre so much as an attitude. And The Beauty of the Death Cap has that attitude in spades.

This isn't some clumsy, oafish attempt at morbid slapstick, though. Any book that begins by quoting Pliny the Elder either can't take itself seriously or is full of sinister deceit. Or both. I learned the hard way that here it was both.

Take a look at my limited notes:

I do appreciate a good, mildly-neurotic narrator.

I absolutely love this snarky, secretly-insecure narrative voice.

Just keeps getting drenched in gentlemanly insidiousness. I love the narrative voice, but despise the narrator. Okay, who am I kidding? I love the narrator, though I should despise him.

What's so grimly beautiful about this book is the progression one sees in Nikonor's revelations. The old analogy of peeling onions is apt. One could be moved to tears by the recognition of the narrator's growing (or is it just more and more obvious?) psychosis. And it stinks and stings, but you just can't help but keep digging deeper, like you're some kind of OCD psychiatrist who has to see what makes this man tick.

Or you just have a morbid curiosity. Okay, let's face it, it's the latter. We can't wait to see the ultimate end to this oncoming train wreck. We have to stay till the end. We are, as they say, "completists".

Along the road (strewn with bodies in our wake), we get some deliciously devious and understated gems, such as this:

I have long been in the habit of cooking for myself, which is useful when one lives in autarky. This way, I am not forced to depend on a sullen, nosy, or preachy cook. Marie came back to work for me for a few months after my mother moved to Creuse (three or four years after my father's death), but I must admit that the co-habitation did not proceed smoothly. Age had embittered her; she muttered constantly under her breath and had to be handled with kid gloves. She talked endlessly about Anastasie in the most outrageously hagiographic terms, and had the further audacity to ask me completely inappropriate questions about old Legrandin (I wonder if she hadn't carried something of a torch for him in her youth) and, in the evenings, after dinner, she had acquired the habit of wandering morosely - and suspiciously - down to the fishpond.

Claiming that I was spending more and more time in Paris, I eventually dismissed her completely, sweetening the deal with a goodly sum to ensure her a comfortable retirement (and assure me of her eternal gratitude). Thus we parted on the very best of terms; I even went so far as to accompany her to the train station in Ussel. Just as she was climbing with astonishing agility into her compartment, I surprised her with one last parting gift: a packet of the dried parasol mushrooms she loved so much.

And so Marie returned to her native Indre, and I never heard anything of her again (I must also admit that I have never been in the habit of following the obituaries in the various regional newspapers too closely).

And so it goes. On and on in a similar vein until things really come to a head and the plot resolves.

But, really, the plot is just a side issue. I can take it or leave it.

I love how Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze turns the banal into the fantastical, but without any truly outre methodology. Perhaps this is reflective of the psychoactive qualities of some mushrooms. Common fungus, really, until you eat one. It reminds me of Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Irreality a bit, or Roland Topor's The Tenant, but with a more gentlemanly approach (I use the term very loosely). Dousteyssier-Khoze nudges the imagination, just barely, but it's enough to push the reader into phantasmagoria, even without such things explicitly appearing on the page.

It just seems appropriate that the push into morbid fantasy would not take place via ink on the paper of the book, but in the reader's head.

Which might say something about the reader.



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