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Monsieur de Phocas

Author: Jean Lorrain

Translator: Francis Amery   Cover design: Marie Lane  

Monsieur de Phocas ranks with A Rebours as the summation of the French Decadent Movement. Modelled on The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it drips with evil and certainly would have unpublishable in fin-de-siecle England.

'With Ethel’s friends, grotesque, ageing decadents, Phocas for the first time tastes opium. He experiences the pleasure of absolute degradation, and the double pleasure of being both observer and observed, dominant subject and passive object. As the opium takes effect, the naked Javanese dancers at the orgy vanish in a swirling cloud, to be replaced by a dark lamplit street where two thieves carefully saw at a woman’s throat with a delicate knifeblade. From this cruel vision, Phocas soars into dizzy flight from which, suddenly, he plunges to destruction, into oozing depths where clinging vampires suck his blood, until he almost swoons into spasms. The mysterious, vicious double is on the threshold of existence: Phocas sees himself as Giles de Retz in the forest of Tiffauges, haunted by obscene desires.
Jennifer Birkett in Sins of the Fathers

Monsieur de Phocas will appeal strongly to readers of Oscar Wilde and fin-de-siecle fiction.

RRP: £9.99

No. of pages: 272

Publication date: 26.02.2021

ISBN numbers:
Paperback
978 1 912868 09 4
Ebook
978 1 909232 19 8

Rights:
World English Language in this translation