Necrophiliac, The
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For more than three decades, Lucien - one of the most notorious characters in the history of the novel - has haunted the imaginations of readers around the world. This new translation introduces English readers to a masterpiece of French literature. Like the best writings of Edgar Allen Poe or Baudelaire, Wittkop's prose goes far beyond gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This strange novella caught my attention after an article in the Guardian. I've never seen a book about necrophilia, much less a story told from the perspective of a necrophiliac - why not? Well, as you might expect it's an odd tale.
Lucien is an antique dealer, a French gentleman, and a necrophiliac. The book is told from the first person perspective in diary form as we follow Lucien's dark adventures robbing graves and taking the recently interred back to his home where his actions with them are described in unflinching detail.
There isn't much else to the story - the types of dead people changes such as going from a young woman, to an older woman, to a man, to a child, and to a mother and her baby. Each encounter is described tenderly as you would expect a romance novel to be told except one of the (unwilling) participants is dead.
Gabrielle Wittkop does try to explain her protagonist's behaviour but I found her explanation a bit pat. Lucien masturbates for the first time shortly before his grandmother tells him his mother has died and that he must say goodbye. As he kisses the corpse of his mother he forever links the two things together - sexuality and death. A bit too convenient, no? I think the reality of the mind of a necrophiliac would be more complex than that to the point that their behaviour and their choices would be unexplainable and utterly confounding to the ordinary person.
Lucien is an interesting person though. At times, strangely normal as he goes about his ordinary daytime life, at others when he is with a dead infant for example he clearly sets down his distinction between himself and a famous French medieval nobleman who raped and murdered children called Gilles de Rais (look his bio up, it's truly fascinating). Wittkop has done a good job of creating a real person in this short novel.
I think the shortness of the book (83 pages on smaller than average pages) helps the book as I don't think I could have finished it at even twice the length. The repeated trysts that Lucien describes with the various corpses becomes both distasteful and dreary by the end of the book. The determinedly un-erotic nature of Lucien's actions and the lack of a plot means the reader is left with descriptions of putrefying bodies and the various methods of maintaining dead bodies for days on end.
Wittkop has created an original character in Lucien while gifting him with an eloquent voice that never fails to disturb. Her writing is truly high quality and the book is easy to read for that reason, but difficult to read because of the subject matter. Morbidly interesting, anyone interested in horror or gothic literature should have this on their "must-read" list.
Lucien is an antique dealer, a French gentleman, and a necrophiliac. The book is told from the first person perspective in diary form as we follow Lucien's dark adventures robbing graves and taking the recently interred back to his home where his actions with them are described in unflinching detail.
There isn't much else to the story - the types of dead people changes such as going from a young woman, to an older woman, to a man, to a child, and to a mother and her baby. Each encounter is described tenderly as you would expect a romance novel to be told except one of the (unwilling) participants is dead.
Gabrielle Wittkop does try to explain her protagonist's behaviour but I found her explanation a bit pat. Lucien masturbates for the first time shortly before his grandmother tells him his mother has died and that he must say goodbye. As he kisses the corpse of his mother he forever links the two things together - sexuality and death. A bit too convenient, no? I think the reality of the mind of a necrophiliac would be more complex than that to the point that their behaviour and their choices would be unexplainable and utterly confounding to the ordinary person.
Lucien is an interesting person though. At times, strangely normal as he goes about his ordinary daytime life, at others when he is with a dead infant for example he clearly sets down his distinction between himself and a famous French medieval nobleman who raped and murdered children called Gilles de Rais (look his bio up, it's truly fascinating). Wittkop has done a good job of creating a real person in this short novel.
I think the shortness of the book (83 pages on smaller than average pages) helps the book as I don't think I could have finished it at even twice the length. The repeated trysts that Lucien describes with the various corpses becomes both distasteful and dreary by the end of the book. The determinedly un-erotic nature of Lucien's actions and the lack of a plot means the reader is left with descriptions of putrefying bodies and the various methods of maintaining dead bodies for days on end.
Wittkop has created an original character in Lucien while gifting him with an eloquent voice that never fails to disturb. Her writing is truly high quality and the book is easy to read for that reason, but difficult to read because of the subject matter. Morbidly interesting, anyone interested in horror or gothic literature should have this on their "must-read" list.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Lucien is a necrophiliac stealing bodies from graveyards to take home and make the object of his desires. This novella, first published in 1972, takes the form of Lucien's diary as he calmly describes his corpses, what he does with them, how they change over time, and the frustrations and satisfactions of his obsession.
It goes without saying that one needs a strong stomach to read this book, some of the scenes are as graphic as those in "American Psycho", for example, and Lucien's bodies include those of children and babies. This, however, is also a lyrical book with passages of great beauty which are in tension with the subject matter.
Lucien is reminiscent of some of Camus's amoral narrators and as a reader one becomes swept along with him, only having hints of the figure he chooses to present to the outside world.
This is the first publication of the novella in English and I look forward to more of Wittkop's works being translated. The paperback is a lovely object with pleasing paper and typography, marred only by a few typos.
It goes without saying that one needs a strong stomach to read this book, some of the scenes are as graphic as those in "American Psycho", for example, and Lucien's bodies include those of children and babies. This, however, is also a lyrical book with passages of great beauty which are in tension with the subject matter.
Lucien is reminiscent of some of Camus's amoral narrators and as a reader one becomes swept along with him, only having hints of the figure he chooses to present to the outside world.
This is the first publication of the novella in English and I look forward to more of Wittkop's works being translated. The paperback is a lovely object with pleasing paper and typography, marred only by a few typos.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Very short and very good. The content is described in the other two reviews, and both story and Wittkop's presentation of it are arresting. This could have been a lurid tale, or one overwhelmed by a narrator's moral agonising over his actions, but Lucien's narration is calm, spare, subtly humourous, and sometimes poetic. The style is so attractive that when I tried to begin a more conventional novel shortly after finishing this, I gave it up as an irritant: relative to this book, it seemed ridiculously wordy. Wittkop passes no overt judgement on Lucien though she gently implies, through both his words and his actions, the extent of his self-delusion.
There is one rather colourful description at the book's beginning, but that aside I can't imagine a reader finding any of the incidents repugnant in a visceral way. A couple of aspects of the story did niggle slightly, though: Whilst the origin of Lucien's inclinations is entirely plausible, the passage detailing it doesn't seem quite to fit in--perhaps because it's the only one taking us back to the distant past--and I found it difficult to suspend disbelief so much as to accept without question Lucien's being able to dig up graves and take bodies home (via a lift, no less) to his apartment unobserved.
Overall, I'm left very eager to read more of Wittkop's books.
There is one rather colourful description at the book's beginning, but that aside I can't imagine a reader finding any of the incidents repugnant in a visceral way. A couple of aspects of the story did niggle slightly, though: Whilst the origin of Lucien's inclinations is entirely plausible, the passage detailing it doesn't seem quite to fit in--perhaps because it's the only one taking us back to the distant past--and I found it difficult to suspend disbelief so much as to accept without question Lucien's being able to dig up graves and take bodies home (via a lift, no less) to his apartment unobserved.
Overall, I'm left very eager to read more of Wittkop's books.
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