From Publishers Weekly
"Dream is a second life," begins Nerval's classic, "Aurelia," and that is the theme illuminated by this memorable anthology of supernatural tales of 19th-century French fiction. Kessler has gracefully translated nine of the 13 stories and written an introduction that puts the stories in an historical context of the French Revolution, the Terror and contemporary scientific and spiritualist schools of thought. Stories by Balzac, Dumas, Maupassant and Verne delve into that gray slip of a space between dreams and wakefulness where somnambulism is not the exception but rather the rule. The anthology opens with the first English appearance of Nodier's stunning "Smarra," in which vampires and nightmarish images violate the landscape. In Balzac's "The Red Inn," a crime is committed by one man in thought and by another in deed. In Merimee's compelling "The Venus of Ille," a demonically beautiful statue comes to life to exact revenge on a man who pays her disrespect. Severed heads do not mean severed tongues in Dumas's "The Slap of Charlotte Corday," (also in its first English translation), an effective exploration of irrational terror evoked by the subconscious. These haunting tales are definitely not bedtime stories for the faint of heart. But for stronger sorts, this superb anthology is a literary tour of the phantasmagoric landscape of dreams.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This compilation represents a noteworthy publishing event, "no selection of such stories in English translation has been made available thus far." Of the 13 (how appropriate) ghost stories selected, 9 represent new translations and 2 have never before been translated into English. Editor Kessler's introduction expertly sets the nineteenth-century French fantastic story within the broader context of French literary and cultural traditions of the time and introduces the career and significance of each writer whose work is included. There are such well-known masters as Honore{‚}de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas (whose story "The Slap of Charlotte Corday" is itself a slap, a jolting piece set in the time of the French Revolution and concerned with the continuance of life after the guillotine has separated head from torso), but there are also superb writers with whom American readers won't be as familiar, including Ge{‚}rard De Nerval and Marcel Schwob (the latter's story, "The Veiled Man," a brief but pithy tale about a man on a train that is Poe-like in its brilliant depiction of the man's hauntedness). Fiction collections catering to sophisticated readers should purchase this volume without fail.
Brad Hooper
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