The Refugees Book

Imagine a writer of genius'like Nabokov in Pale Fire'who creates as his unreliable narrator another genius, a man who (in addition to his narcissism and a host of disagreeable opinions) is also stark, staring mad! Ah, but then'to move beyond Nabokov'imagine that this madman's creator is also a madman, and you will have imagined a work akin to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's The Vampire Soul.

De L'Isle-Adam came by his madness the old-fashioned way: he inherited it. His father threw away the family fortune buying up old aristocratic estates, defacing their grounds with unsightly holes, and selling them at a loss. His objective: to find the fabled lost treasure of the Knights of Malta. His son--our writer--was extraordinarily eccentric, if not precisely mad, haunting cafes at all hours to avoid his poor shabby room, feverishly scribbling his articles and stories on any piece of paper that came to hand, convinced that one day these fragments would bring him enormous fame. He wrote pounds of dreck, but also enough dark, concentrated, memorable tales to earn himself the title of "the French Edgar Allan Poe". (You may find many of them in Cruel Tales, a collection well worth your time.)

The Vampire Soul is dark and memorable, but it could not be called "concentrated." At its heart is a frightening story of possession by a dead soul seeking revenge, but it is embroidered, postponed and frustrated by a host of philosophical reflections by the three main characters, the fanciest, most frustrating roadblock to a clear narrative being the narrator himself, Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet. The conservative Catholic de L'Isle-Adam created Bonhomet to embody everything he loathed--atheism, godless science, a disdain for the symbolic, a love for absurdly literal solutions'but he unbalances his tale so unrelentingly that he forces the reader to question the mental balance of the author himself.

I have to admit I thoroughly enjoyed the first thirty pages, seeing in Bonhomet an amusing and worthy ancestor to Nabokov's Kinbote. But then philosophical reflection piled upon philosophical reflection, ironies became buried beneath heaps of obsessions and quirkiness, and I became convinced I was reading someone a few french fries short of a happy meal, someone more than a few ravens short of a Poe.

The short novel that gives this volume its name is followed by ten vignettes and stories that carry on the adventures'or at least the spirit'of Dr. Tribulet Bonhomet. I did not find them particularly memorable, except for the "The Swan Killer," which has at its heart a wild, violent host of images I find it impossible to get out of my mind. Read it if you get the chance, and it will give your a taste at the extraordinary effects that'at his best'the eccentric "French Poe" was capable of.