THE NECROPHILIAC review
review by Maria Cohut
Eccentric French novelist Gabrielle Wittkop had a pronounced tasted for the sinister, wrote ten books of dubious repute and killed herself in 2002. The antihero of THE NECROPHILIAC is a Goethesque romantic, and his baroque tale is told in bewitching prose...
“To the memory of C.D., who fell into death like Narcissus into his own image”...
This is the dedication on the first page of French writer Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel, THE NECROPHILIAC: The Most Forbidden Love Of All, which has only recently been translated into English by macabre writer and enthusiast Don Bapst. I found the book the day before my birthday, whilst I was casually strolling through the local bookshop. It was on the “novelties bookshelf”: A slender volume with a stylishly intricate cover design, a dark jewel of a book. It was also the only copy on display, almost hidden from view between a couple of gargantuan new apparitions. I knew I wanted it immediately and bought it in the next few seconds under the baffled scrutiny of the shop attendant on duty. It was probably the best birthday present I ever bought myself.
I’d never heard about Gabrielle Wittkop before, but a simple Google search taught me that she was an eccentric French novelist with a pronounced taste for the sinister, who wrote ten books of dubious repute and killed herself in 2002, probably in response to her torturing fight with cancer. THE NECROPHILIAC – according to unreliable internet sources – was the first novel she ever published. The book is written in the form of a journal and it follows the life of Lucien, a young man from Paris who is painfully obsessed with death. His obsession takes the form of necrophilia, a psychiatric condition translated through an erotic fascination with corpses. The prose itself is bewitching, and even though you may be way over the age of eighteen and therefore immune to “parental guidance”-type restrictions, it will still make you feel as though you were trespassing, partaking of something forbidden and dangerously alluring.
Lucien’s point of view is conveyed through well-balanced lyrical prose and the – how else should I term it but “gothic” – passion he expresses for the bodies he unburies is far from ludicrous or nauseating. On the contrary, the whole story has an air of sacred, consuming, pagan kind of erotic rapture as opposed to sacrilegious defilement. Lucien is not simply a desecrator of corpses; he comes across, rather, as a despairing romantic of the kind of Goethe’s Werther, the young man who ends up killing himself as the result of a frustrated love story. THE NECROPHILIAC is, more than anything, a careful study of the melancholy human psyche pushed to the extreme and trying to cope with the – often traumatising – reality of death by transforming it into an intimate expression of love. Of course, in doing so it flies right off the tracks of “normality” and into “the valley of the shadow of death”, to quote the Bible, that is into the realm of the obscure and unsettling. Though short, the book is packed with tension and graphic descriptions that – why shouldn’t I admit it? – don’t fail to deliver the guilty pleasure of observing nameless acts through a peephole.
This novel’s got everything from illicit sex set against a carefully-wrought baroque backdrop to hair-raising confrontations in the graveyard, in the middle of the night. And if you’re set upon reading and enjoying the text to its full extent, take my advice: only read it at sundown, preferably in the company of a bottle of exquisite wine and with neoclassical music playing quietly in the background. Or not – if you’re more darkly-inclined, then you’ll surely appreciate the “bouquet” of Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel regardless of place or beverage. For those of you living in the UK, this dark jewel of a book can also be purchased online on Amazon UK (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necrophiliac-Gabrielle-Wittkop/dp/1550229435/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316017146&sr=8-1), so if you’re into extravagantly obscure pleasures, go ahead and buy yourself this beautiful decadent present.
Buy THE NECROPHILIAC - Paperback
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Buy THE NECROPHILIAC - Paperback
Maria Cohut, also known as Kalyiel, is best described as an obsessed reader of obscure fantasy, and a quirky aspiring writer of weird fiction. She is currently reading English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, and in her spare time she likes to watch old movies with a spooky atmosphere, and to collect and do a bit of research on uncanny vintage photographs and postcards.
