The King in the Golden Mask - Marcel Schwob

The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob / ISBN 9781939663238 / paperback with flaps from Wakefield Press

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First published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the Golden Mask gathers together twenty-one of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories swarm around moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy, and medieval witchcraft, this collection describes for us historically attested clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV, a ten-year-old French viscountess seeking vengeance for her unwilled espousal to a money-grubbing French lord, and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating and ebullient form as it comes into contact with his unparalleled imagination.

Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman. His allegiances were to Rabelais and François Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the author who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu Roi. He was also the uncle of Lucy Schwob, better remembered today as the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

Press

“Famous in Europe for his uncategorisable, indelible texts, which mix history and phantasmagoria, Marcel Schwob has been too-little known in English for too long. Wakefield Press and its brilliant young translator Kit Schluter is changing all that. The King in the Golden Mask (first published in French in 1892) gathers 21 of Schwob’s most cruel and erudite tales, full of murder, medieval witchcraft, galley slaves, royal intrigue, gambling aristocrats and the plague of 1374. Schwob’s weird hallucinatory fables now not only shine in English, but glow in the dark.”
—Barbara Epler, Tank Magazine

“Kit Schluter’s translation from the French is superb and he provides a thoughtful afterward.”
—Martin Billheimer, Counterpunch

“Schwob disbelieved in originality—everything had been said, had been done—but he trusted in the creative spirit. His stories both draw on historical sources and forfeit narrative by instead acknowledging that thieves, pirates, street urchins and prisoners are equally cursed to be human, and to be human is to indulge in casual cruelty. This confluence is unexpected, even jarring. Indeed, the mystery and inexplicability of the stories often result in something profoundly moving.”
—Tristan Foster, Music & Literature

“Let’s call Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) the Mallarmé of short fiction.”
—Garrett Caples, The Believer