The unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by
Mallarmé, Jarry and Gide, in a new translation
When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it
immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist
movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stéphane Mallarmé, Alfred
Jarry and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends,
aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply
enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of
literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the
Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the
result of Schwob's intense emotional suffering over the loss of his
love, a "girl of the streets" named Louise, whom he had befriended in
1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her
into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the
stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment,
caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter
world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle
masterpiece into English.
A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire
and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905)
was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the
poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and
Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the
uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.
