Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Book of Monelle
    The Book of Monelle
    The Book of Monelle
    Ebook120 pages2 hours

    The Book of Monelle

    By Marcel Schwob

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWakefield Press
    Release dateAug 13, 2020
    ISBN9781939663573
    The Book of Monelle

    Read more from Marcel Schwob

    Related to The Book of Monelle

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Toward A Unified Theory

      Jan 1, 2022

      Condemned to live inside the weatherof our moods What are you doing? Filling this bucket with waterand dumping it into the water They can’t excavate the amphitheater further because it extends backbeneath the houses We close their eyes not for thembu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Living Mandelstam

      May 1, 2020

      It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Dav

      13 min read

    • Article

      Where To Start With Louise Glück, Winner Of The 2020 Nobel Prize In Literature

      Oct 14, 2020

      The Swedish Academy has awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature to Louise Gluck, a former U.S. poet laureate. The 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American woman since Toni Morrison in 1993, Gluck is the author of 12 poetry

      3 min read

    • Article

      Seeds of Change

      Sep 14, 2021

      Seeds of Change
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 250

      Dec 7, 2021

      The Art of Fiction No. 250
      31 min read

    • Article

      On The Shelf

      Apr 14, 2020

      Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark is not your average autobiography. The book mirrors the fragmented and sometimes confusing nature of the author’s life. Wark freely admits she has no answers to the many questions she poses or to the situations confro

      3 min read

    • Article

      Blood, Shit, and Sex

      Mar 22, 2019

      Blood, Shit, and Sex
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno

      Dec 12, 2019

      I am at this point in my life where I find these lists voluptuous brags about time, which I have surely been party to in the past. The post A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 245

      Dec 15, 2019

      The Art of Fiction No. 245
      42 min read

    • Article

      Perfection

      Jun 9, 2020

      For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume. My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Book of Monelle

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Book of Monelle - Marcel Schwob

      I

      THE WORDS OF MONELLE

      Monelle found me in the plain where I was wandering and took me by the hand.

      Do not be surprised, she said. "It is I, and it is not I;

      "You shall find me again, and you shall lose me;

      "Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me;

      And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.

      And Monelle said again: I shall speak to you of young prostitutes, and you shall know the beginning.

      Bonaparte the killer, at eighteen years of age, met a young prostitute by the iron gates of the Palais-Royal. She was pale, and she shivered in the cold. But I had to live, she told him. Neither you nor I know the name of this little girl Bonaparte led through one November night to his room in the Hôtel de Cherbourg. She came from Nantes, in Brittany. She was weak and weary, and her lover had just left her. She was simple and good hearted, and her voice was very gentle. Bonaparte remembered all of this. And I believe that, later, the memory of her voice moved him to tears, and that for a long time he sought her out, never to see her again, in the nights of winter.

      For you see, these young prostitutes leave the crowds of the night but once for an act of kindness. Poor Ann ran to Thomas De Quincey, the opium eater, as he swooned beneath the great gaslights of Oxford Street. With moist eyes, she held a glass of sweet wine to his lips, kissed him, and took him in her arms. Then she returned to the night. Perhaps she died shortly thereafter. She was coughing, said De Quincey, the evening I saw her last. Perhaps she was still wandering the streets; but despite the passion of his search, and though he braved the laughter of those he addressed, Ann was lost forever. When later he had a warm home, he would often think to himself tearfully that poor Ann could have lived well there beside him; instead, he imagined her sick, or dying, or deserted, in the central darkness of a London brothel, and she had carried away with her all the pitiful love his heart had to offer.

      You see, they heave a cry of compassion to all of you and stroke your hands with their bony hands. They only understand you if you are extremely unfortunate; they cry with you and console you. Little Nellie approached the convict, Dostoyevsky, outside his infamous house, and dying of a fever, watched him for a long time with her big, trembling black eyes. Little Sonya (she existed like all the others) kissed Rodion, the murderer, after the confession of his crime. You lost your way! she said desperately. And getting up suddenly, she threw herself onto his neck and kissed him … No, there is no man on earth now more unfortunate than you! she cried in a surge of pity, and all of a sudden she burst into tears.

      Like Ann and she who has no name and who approached the young and sad Bonaparte, little Nellie sank into the fog. Dostoyevsky did not say what became of little Sonya, pale and emaciated. Neither you nor I know if she was able to help Raskolnikov through his atonement. I, for one, doubt it. She died softly in his arms, having suffered and loved too much.

      None of them, you see, can stay with you. They would be too sad, and they are ashamed to stay. When you cry no more, they dare not look at you. They teach you the lesson they have to teach you, and then they go. They come through the cold and the rain to kiss your foreheads and dry your eyes, and the awful shadows take them back. For they must perhaps go elsewhere.

      You only know them while they are compassionate. You must not think of anything else. You must not think of what they have been able to do in the shadows. Nellie in the wretched house, Sonya drunk on a bench on the boulevard, Ann carrying back the empty bottle to the wine merchant’s from a dark alley were all perhaps cruel and obscene. These are creatures of the flesh. They came out of a solemn impasse to offer a kiss of pity beneath the gaslights of the main street. In that moment, they were divine.

      You must forget everything else.

      Monelle grew quiet and looked at me:

      I came from the night, she said, and I shall return to the night. For I too am a young prostitute.

      And Monelle said again:

      I pity you, I pity you, my love.

      Even so, I shall return to the night; for it is necessary that you lose me before you find me again. And if you find me again, I shall elude you once more.

      For I am she who is alone.

      And Monelle said again:

      Because I am alone, you shall give me the name Monelle. But you shall imagine that I have every other name.

      And I am this one and that one and she who has no name.

      And I shall lead you among my sisters who are myself and similar to witless prostitutes.

      And you shall see them tormented by selfishness and desire and cruelty and pride and patience and pity, not yet having found themselves at all.

      And you shall see them set out in search of themselves in the distance;

      And you yourself shall find me, and I shall find myself; and you shall lose me, and I shall lose myself.

      For I am she who is lost as soon as she is found.

      And Monelle said again:

      On this day a young woman shall touch you with her hand and flee;

      Because all things are fleeting, but Monelle is the most fleeting.

      And before you have found me again, I shall teach you in this plain, and you shall write the book of Monelle.

      And Monelle handed me a hollow stalk of fennel, inside of which burned a pink filament.

      Take this torch, she said, "and burn. Burn everything on the earth and in the sky. And break the fennel and put out its flame when you have finished burning, for nothing should be passed on;

      So that you be the second Narthekophoros, and that you destroy with fire, and that the fire fallen from the sky rise again to its heights.

      And Monelle said again: I shall speak to you of destruction.

      Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. Make space for your soul and for all other souls.

      Destroy all good and all evil. Their ruins are the same.

      Destroy the old dwellings of man and the old dwellings of the soul; what is dead is a distorting mirror.

      Destroy, for all creation comes from destruction.

      And for higher benevolence you must annihilate lower benevolence. And thus new good appears saturated with evil.

      And to imagine a new art you must break its forebears. And thus new art seems a sort of iconoclasm.

      For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but forms.

      But you must destroy the forms.

      And Monelle said again: I shall speak to you of formation.

      The very desire for the new is merely the hunger of the soul seeking form.

      And souls shed past forms as snakes slough their skins.

      And the patient collectors of old snakeskins sadden the young snakes, for they hold a magical power over them.

      For he who possesses old snakeskins keeps the young snakes from their transformation.

      And that is why snakes slough their skins in the verdant trench of a deep thicket; and once a year the young gather in a circle to burn the old skins.

      In this way, embody the destructive and formative seasons.

      Build your house alone and, alone, burn it to the ground.

      Throw no debris behind you; may each put his ruins to use.

      Construct nothing in nights past. Set

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1