Gabrielle Wittkop

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, the first English translation of Wittkop's notorious novel, 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 of the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.

The Necrophiliac

In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. "Murder Most Serene" offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--"present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins." Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an "intellectual alliance," given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, "The Necrophiliac," appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Murder Most Serene

Exemplary Departures consists of five exquisitely wrought novellas depicting five "exemplary" deaths in various exotic locations around the globe: a gentleman spy disappears with his secrets into the Malaysian jungle; a young woman agonizes atop a ruined castle overlooking the Rhine; a writer succumbs to alcoholism in the streets of Baltimore; a salesman expires as a vagabond in the sewers of New York; and hermaphroditic twins are assassinated in a stagecoach. Drawing from the remnants of real-life anecdotes--from Edgar Allan Poe's final days to the agonizing tale of Idilia Dubb--these stories are imagined descents into death's supreme indifference. A true modern inheritor of the legacy of the French Decadent writers, Wittkop spins these tales with her trademark macabre elegance and chilling humor, maneuvering in an uncertain space between dark Romanticism, Gothic Expressionism and Sadean cruelty. "Death is life's most important moment," Wittkop claimed; Exemplary Departures offers five particularly important moments for the English reader's delectation. First published as a set of three novellas in 1995, this translation is of the 2012 edition of five novellas, which include the previously unpublished "Mr. T.'s Last Secret" and "Claude and Hippolyte."

Exemplary Departures

Barnahandlerskan

De necrofiel

Un gentleman espion disparaît emportant avec lui ses secrets au cœur de la jungle malaise. Une jeune femme de bonne famille agonise au sommet d’une tour en ruines surplombant le Rhin. Un écrivain aux yeux ténébreux crève d’alcoolisme au fond d’une ruelle de Baltimore. Un vendeur falot s’éteint en vagabond dans les entrailles de New York. Deux jumeaux hermaphrodites de noble extraction sont froidement assassinés dans leur diligence. Entre romantisme noir, expressionnisme gothique et délectation sadienne, ces cinq nouvelles – dont deux inédites, 'Les derniers secrets de Mr. T.' et 'Claude et Hippolyte' – renouent avec le charme vénéneux de Gabrielle Wittkop, sa prose macabre et raffinée, précieuse et mordante, qui l’imposent comme une 'Peintre de la mort' résolument moderne.

Gabrielle Wittkop

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