*reveling in obscure weirdness once again: Alraune, by Hanns Heinz Ewers

9780987195395
Birchgrove Press, 2013
340 pp
originally published 1911
translated by S. Guy Endore
paperback


That decadent vibe -- I just love it and this book is filled with it.  Alraune brings together a bit of the grotesque, the perverse, and all manner of weirdness that appeals, but when all is said and done, it's the German style of decadence that resonates.    It is Ewers' second entry in his Frank Braun trilogy, between The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Vampire, neither of which I've read. Alraune is another word for mandrake, the legends of which  go way back in history, but for our purposes, it's the German version told in this book that's relevant:

"The criminal stripped naked as a pair of tongs and hanged at the crossroads, lost, so the story goes, his final seed, the moment his neck was broken. This seed falls to the ground and there germinates. Thence resonates an alraune, either a little man or a little woman."

In the house of King's Councilor Gontram,  there is an alraune manikin made of wood hanging on the wall; according to the same legend, it "served as an amulet against witchcraft and drew money into the house."  Present at the house when the manikin is discovered is Frank Braun, nephew to Jacob ten Brinken, who is Privy Councilor and scientist involved in some pretty bizarre experiments.  Braun decides that his uncle should "create an alraune: one that will be alive, one of flesh and blood." He is fascinated with the idea, and tells his uncle that he is the only one who can "make truth out of the lie," by bringing the legend to life.  Off to the lab goes our somewhat mad scientist with the sperm of a hanged man, with which he inseminates a prostitute and thus is born Alraune, formed "against all laws of nature." Even before she's born, she can be heard screaming in the womb, much like the mandrake is supposed to sound as it's being pulled out of the earth.  After her birth she is adopted by ten Brinken, baptized, and later sent off to school where she begins to realize that no one, absolutely no one, male or female, can resist her.  People are like Alraune's toys -- she plays with them for a while, gets what she wants from them, and then they are discarded. A better analogy is that she is the proverbial flame luring the moth -- and when some poor soul gets too close to her,  he/she finds his/her wings singed or even sometimes flat out destroyed. The story follows Alraune as she grows up, makes her father's fortune, and plays with people, up until one man comes along who seems to be immune to her.

There are so many ways anyone could read this novel so I'm not going to go into the under-the-surface stuff here.  Suffice it to say that Alraune is downright weird, and its sheer weirdness is augmented by the original drawings by Mahlon Blaine.  For example, here's his depiction of death "gliding through the quiet house"

(that's a cigar in the skeleton's mouth), and an illustration of Alraune's "father's" perverse feelings toward her, in a scene where she's dressed up like an "elevator-boy in a tight-fitting scarlet uniform," since it pleases him when she dresses like a boy:

Seriously, there's some very messed up stuff going on in this novel, but by now everyone knows I love really strange books and that I love old books -- Alraune is a bizarre blend of both.  Try at your own risk -- it's really going to appeal to readers who appreciate the old decadent aesthetic, and frankly,  it is just plain odd but I  loved it.  This book crawled underneath my skin and hasn't left.

Oh! PS:  I forgot -- I did watch an adaptation of this novel, English title "Unnatural," with Erich von Stroheim as ten Brinken and Hildegarde Neff in the title role.  It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of the novel as well as the acting, but it was still fun.

*Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind

0375725849
Vintage International, 2001
originally published as Das Parfum, 1986
translated by John E. Woods
255 pp

paperback

"What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love."

There are just some books you want to sit down and discuss with a group of people, and Perfume is definitely one of those.  A couple of days after I'd finished it, I went to look at reader reviews and found a number of different takes on it.  For example, on Amazon, one reader referred to it as "one of the best, strangest thriller novels..." , another praised its "dark, gothic, serial killer plot of a genre pageturner," still another says it's a "commentary on perversion, unfettered arrogance, and ironically misplaced idealism."  So I went to goodreads to see what readers there said, and found "one of the greatest horror novels ever written," and "a cross between Silence of the Lambs and a period drama."  Sheesh -- the interpretations seem endless!!

  So then I went to contemporary reviews of this book and even here I got very different impressions.  For example (and with apologies to anyone without an NYRB archives subscription) Robert M. Adams' NYRB review saw it as a story of

"an alleged sniffer of genius, born to squalor in eighteenth-century France, who by sheer concentrated nose-power rises to be the supreme perfumer of his age, and simultaneously an atrocious criminal."

He also said it was "a ridiculously improbably piece of verbose claptrap..." as well as an allegory of the Third Reich.  Peter Ackroyd, writing in the New York Times, says it's a "meditation on the nature of death, desire and decay."

However anyone may understand or interpret this novel, it just screams let's sit down and talk about it.

[just an fyi: there are a couple of spoilers ahead so beware]:

 I'm tempted to throw it onto this year's real-world book group list, but for some reason my friends don't really do deep dark, and this book is deep dark.  I think that one way to make sense of it is to read it as a story (in part) of personal and artistic identity; it can also be read as one man's quest for purpose, meaning, love, and perfection by a person whose life up to a certain point was destined to remain alone in the stink and squalor of the life he was born into. It's only after his first murder that our main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,  begins to understand that  "Never before in his life had he known what happiness was... for until now he had merely existed like an animal."  His purpose begins taking form at this moment, as he realizes that he

"must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But rather, the greatest perfumer of all time." (43)

And why? He viewed the scent of his first victim as the  "higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty."  He believed that unless he "possessed this scent, his life would have no meaning," so he goes on to try to capture it, hence the series of murders that follows. But there is method to Grenouille's madness. This story isn't about someone who kills just anyone -- as we're told,  "What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love."

Ironically, this "higher principle"  is really only understood by one other person, the father (Richis) of Laure, Grenouille's last victim:

"For if one imagined -- and so Richis imagined -- all the victims not as single individuals, but as parts of some higher principle and thought of each one's characteristics as merged in some idealistic fashion into a unifying whole, then the picture assembled out of such mosaic pieces would be the picture of absolute beauty, and the magic that radiated from it would no longer be of human, but of divine origin."  (203)  

 Obviously there's so much more to this novel that I can't really go into here although I wish I could -- the very important connection between being scentless and the resulting perception of being soulless (and in my opinion I can read "self" less here), Grenouille's time in seclusion, the bizarre ending ... there's just too, too much.  But I will say that I absolutely loved this book on many levels and was hooked from page one.  God, this is a great novel!!

Laure Richis (as played by Rachel Hurd-Wood) from the movie 

Sadly, to me anyway, while the film was okay and while I couldn't stop watching,  it sort of missed some of the (if you'll pardon the pun) essence of the novel. There are a number of differences between book and movie, but the book offers so much more in terms of sensory details that to me are highly important -- as just one example from the beginning, why it is that Jean-Baptiste is shunned as an infant by his first caretakers, the wet nurse and then a Catholic priest.  Plus, I really, really hate voice-overs on films, but that's just me.  Read the book, then see the movie in that order, and chances are you won't need the voice-overs.

The Man Who Sees Ghosts, by Friedrich Schiller

9781901285123
Pushkin, 2003
156 pp

paperback

Despite its title, The Man Who Sees Ghosts isn't actually a novel of the supernatural.  There are a number of supernatural elements in this unfinished story, but they're all there for a specific purpose having to do with the main character, the Prince von **.  These asterisks, by the way, are not a signal to read something at the end of this post -- Schiller just doesn't hand out full names to his characters.  There are many reasons why any serious fan of dark fiction should read this little gem, but one of the biggest is that according to several sources, it is the book that gave rise to a particular subset of popular gothic literature, at least in Germany,  "works intended to expose the machinations of secret societies," * (okay, that asterisk means look at the end of this post) called lodge novels. In fact, since The Man Who Sees Ghosts was left unfinished, a number of people used it as a basis to write their own completed versions, starting as early as 1796.**

Schiller sets his novel in Venice, which at the time was a political powerhouse.  The book revolves around the unnamed, asterisked Prince, who hails from a German state but currently in Venice, waiting for money from home so he can return. There he lives a very unambitious and quiet life, going around incognito, avoiding all forms of extravagance.  His life takes a major turn when one day, he notices he is being followed by a man in the mask of an Armenian, who eventually sits down with him in the Piazza San Marco and delivers a cryptic and ultimately prophetic message.  The Prince shakes it off, but when the situation in the Prince's family come to a crisis, he is forced to take stock of this strange, masked character.  One night while in a gaming establishment, the Prince gets into it with an unknown-to-him very powerful man, which sparks a visit to the State Inquisition, where he watches the same man quite literally lose his head.  The Prince is still sort of stuck in Venice and can't leave, so he and his retinue take a trip where they become involved in a bizarre seance with an odd man known as "The Sicilian", who, according to several accounts I've read, was modeled after the furtive true-life alchemist and occultist Caliogostro, (aka Joseph Balsamo).  When fate steps in and the Prince is allowed to question this strange man, what he discovers  will turn his world on its head, and the consequences will ultimately have tremendous implications for the Prince, his closest advisors, and had the story continued, most likely for the balance of power in Europe.

Just a word about the secret society mentioned above.  In  this book it is the Bucentauro, which Schiller describes as appearing to be for the "high-minded" and those of "rational freedom of spirit," but which in reality is a haven for a number of highly-placed libertines, including high-ranking members of the Catholic church.  This just might bring to mind that very well-known group "The Illuminati," which has found its way into several works of conspiracy fiction, and here as Bucentauro, represents the power of the Catholics behind social and political upheaval in Europe at the time.   On the other hand, Schiller makes it very clear just exactly how Protestant the Prince's German kingdom was, so it makes for great conflict.  And as far as politics goes, the Catholics weren't the only big names in the secret society biz -- nerdy me has just been reading about Frederick William II of Prussia, who fell in with two powerful Rosicrucians who became his advisors and pretty much ruled Frederick (and thus Prussia)  between them. So I guess my point is that if anyone thinks that it's no big deal that Schiller spends a lot of time on religious conspiracies, I say think again.

The Man Who Sees Ghosts is a delightful read, and should not be missed by anyone who is into Gothic literature,  secret societies,  and political intrigue.  Up to where it comes to a rather abrupt end, I was having such a wonderful time with this little tale, and then I heard myself quite loudly saying "no, no, no!" because of the loose ends that hadn't quite been tied up.  Although the mix of religion and politics, as well as the combination of  religion and conspiracy are topics that surround our modern lives so much so that we just accept them as a given any more, this was quite a big deal back then.  There is also much in this short book about religion and mysticism during the Enlightenment, and if I'm reading this correctly, it seems that Schiller may have also borrowed a bit from Cazotte's The Devil in Love --what's real vs. what's not real are huge issues in The Man Who Sees Ghosts, and will definitely keep any reader glued.   



*from Lure of the Arcane, The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy, by Theodore Ziolkowski
** from The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, (ed.) Jerrold E. Hogle