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paulcowdell's review
5.0
This stunning collection marked a dramatic shift of gear in Jean Ray's weird fiction. It contains a couple of his dead-cert classics (The Mainz Psalter, The Gloomy Alley), but it is much more than just those stories. I'm not going to say anything about the content of this work by 'the Belgian Poe', but translator Scott Nicolay (in a loving and useful Afterword) makes a good case for Ray to be seen in the context of WH Hodgson, Hans Heinz Ewers, Guy de Maupassant and Lovecraft as much as Poe. Nicolay points to this volume as the shift from the rather simpler plot constructions of 'Whiskey Tales' (also now available in English from Wakefield https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38814343-whiskey-tales?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=5OrUoJM75f&rank=2) towards a more fully realised mesh of really strange elements. I came to this through my love of Ray's Harry Dickson tales, so started here rather than the earlier book, but I'll be getting to that - and the rest of Wakefield's ongoing series in due and grateful course.
I can't quite agree with Nicolay that this book, rather than the towering Malpertuis (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171727.Malpertuis?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XronvqTnH5&rank=1), is the pinnacle of Jean Ray's writing - which may be because I'm not so fixated on (or invested in) 'weird' as a literary category - but Nicolay deserves full credit for this labour of love. His translations read well, and the notes sometimes offer excellent insight into the qualities of Ray's prose as well as the literary background shimmering behind Ray's writing. (One long discussion of a particularly tricky word to translate concludes 'The Anglophone world has no comparably freighted term, alas, so I resort instead to this note to provide some of the context that Jean Ray was able to evoke simply through his choice of words').
Sometimes the very existence of a book gives you joy. If its contents also give you a dislocated sense of unease, so much the better.
I can't quite agree with Nicolay that this book, rather than the towering Malpertuis (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171727.Malpertuis?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XronvqTnH5&rank=1), is the pinnacle of Jean Ray's writing - which may be because I'm not so fixated on (or invested in) 'weird' as a literary category - but Nicolay deserves full credit for this labour of love. His translations read well, and the notes sometimes offer excellent insight into the qualities of Ray's prose as well as the literary background shimmering behind Ray's writing. (One long discussion of a particularly tricky word to translate concludes 'The Anglophone world has no comparably freighted term, alas, so I resort instead to this note to provide some of the context that Jean Ray was able to evoke simply through his choice of words').
Sometimes the very existence of a book gives you joy. If its contents also give you a dislocated sense of unease, so much the better.
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