Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel by Rachilde (review)

Book Reviews1 5 1 they meet; he skims from her earnings and profits financially from the filming of their sexual relationship. In NDiaye's text, Rosie's parents are inhuman monsters who brought up their children in total social isolation and abandon them physically and financially after their failure in Paris. In Black's translation, however, there is a definite shift in tone; the overall depravity in NDiaye's story is absent and Black's characters appear as flawed humans plagued by misfortune and their own bad judgement rather than essentially corrupted beings. This alteration in the mood is due, perhaps, to the subtle changes in significance occasioned by Black's word choices. She substitutes "nostalgia" for the French "regret" and the rather straightforward "dreary" for the more poetic "morne" which has the added denotation of a small mountain in the Antilles. Perhaps it is also influenced by the loss of subtext for the English reader who comes across a name such as Brive-laGaillarde , which in French evokes the most mediocre oftowns and the dullest of existences. It is also curious to note that a lithe, nude, pregnant body appears on the cover of the translation when, in Black's words, Rosie is often described as "baggy and shapeless." Rosie Carpe, in translation, is a good novel. The reader comes away with a feeling ofhaving understood the tragedy ofRosie's life. It is not, however , an accurate recreation of NDiaye's deeply disturbing poetic universe. Rosie Carpe, in French, depicts a world where ruthlessly perverse behavior undermines any conventional notion of comprehension or meaning. It is a novel whose characters are deeply implicated in their own dissipation rather than victims of the cruel events and circumstances in their lives. Helen Williams-GinsbergPacific Lutheran University Rachilde. Monsieur Venus: A MaterialistNovel Trans. Melanie Hawthorne. NewYork: Modern Language Association, 2004. Pp vii-xxxix; 211. ISBN 0-87352-930-8. $9.95. Those already familiar with Rachilde know that herfin de siècle novels were often dismissed as sensationalized pulp fiction, and occasionally condemned as pornography. While Rachilde did in fact explore a dizzying spectrum oftaboo topics, today's readers also recognize her works for their innovation , both in style and in subject. The recent availability oíMonsieur Vénus in the MLA "Texts and Translations" series brings to a wider readership an extraordinary tale of simultaneous class and gender warfare, waged by and between the halves of a doomed couple. Raoule de Vénérande is a powerful Parisian socialite, more taken with the thrill of fencing than with her handsome fencing partner, the baron de Raittolbe. When she meets the ethereally fetching Jacques Silvert crafting artificial flowers in a shabby workshop, the unlikely duo is struck by a perverse coup defoudre that will eventually transform him into a kept woman, and her into his cross-dressed lover. In a text steeped in well-worn literary 152Women in French Studies references (variously evoking Adam and Eve, Pygmalion, and numerous figures from Greek mythology), one cannot overlook the text's unflinching exploration of sexual behaviors still likely to raise eyebrows in the twenty-first century. Homoeroticism, transvestitism, sadomasochism, and transsexualism all take shape in the escalating affair. Throughout the narrative, even when Rachilde's words prudishly retreat to euphemism, the actions of her characters are brazenly transparent. A significant achievement of this new translation is its fidelity to the original 1884 version, in which a number of key passages were later censored . The revised 1889 edition, suffering from such omissions, has served as the basis for most English translations of the text. While any extended summary of Rachilde's novels inevitably risks revealing her trademark surprise endings, it must nonetheless be said that the restoration of the final chapter renders the conclusion both more startling and more revealing ofthe author's drive to contest prevailing notions of gender and sex. The author's particular dodge-and-weave approach creates specific challenges in translation. Resisting both the literary and the cultural mainstream of the era, Rachilde's written style employs a strategic intermixing of lush, rococo descriptive passages with clipped conversational exchanges, incomplete sentences, and unorthodox punctuation. In other translations of Monsieur Vénus...