A Leak In The Safe

Until recently I’d never read Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite, even though the titular goddess in my favorite immortal and I have a nice little hardback Modern Library edition. I guess I’m just skeptical about historical fiction, particularly the ponderous, factoid heavy "zounds" and "forsooth" variety. But Aphrodite is no Rob Roy, it’s history as fever dream, more along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites’ impossibly lovely, mystic Middle Ages or, more to the point, the exotic, jewel encrusted paganism of Flaubert’s Salammbo. It’s beautifully written, visionary and erotic, a colorful miniature meant to be consumed not in one big gulp, but in a number of delicate, rich sips.

It’s also totally decadent, a paradigmatic example of the french variety of that strange fruit. I was inspired to read it by Jennifer Birkett’s excellent The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870-1914. Birkett’s reading is, inevitably, political and feminist, but quite acute. As she points out, as was true with a lot of decadent literature, the supposed femme fatale, the harlot Chrysis, ends up being fatal only to herself and other women. Even though she drives the "hero," Demetrios to commit three audacious, sacrilegious crimes, in the end it is only she and two other women who pay the price while he is inspired to create a sculptural masterpiece based on her dead body. In the last account, he prefers works of art and dreams to actually female flesh – a very decadent valuation. At least in noir fiction the sailors go down with the sirens!

But the transgressive kick of Aphrodite cannot be denied, and the whole confection is so delicious that Louys can be forgiven the slightly bitter aftertaste. Here’s some scandalous selections:

It is like a purple flower filled with honey and with scent.

It is like a sea-serpent, alive and soft and open at night.

It is the refuge where man seeks rest on his march toward death.

It is a thing of awe.

It is the face of Medusa.

Here was one and what did she ask? Not love, nor jewels, but three unbelievable crimes.

A virtuous weakening could readily reduce a tragedy to the banality of normal existence.

Luminous, impalpable, supernatural, pure and naked, the vision floated above the stone, throbbing softly.

She took with her a human will in her mouth, like that little stolen rose whose stem she chewed.

Her feet remained still, her knees remained rigid and unparted, and slowly she turned her body upon her motionless hips. Rising above the sheath of her legs, her face and her two breasts were like three great flowers almost pink in the vase of her garment. She danced gravely with her head, her shoulders, and her beautiful twining arms.

No spectacle in nature, not the flaming western sky, the tempest at sea, the palm-trees, the thunder, the mirage, the mighty upheaval of the waters, seems worthy of admiration after one has seen the transformation of a woman in one’s arms. Demetrios gazed in a sort of religious terror at this fury of the goddess inherent in the feminine body, this transport inhabiting a being, this superhuman convulsion of which he was the direct cause, which he could exalt or repress at will, and which for the thousandth time amazed him.

Well, here’s the monthly round up of the strangest sounding micro press and self published books. Read the actual descriptions penned by the authors – this is all true – I couldn’t make up the name Tami Hotard, much less Dismas Latronum. 

Arrows by Buck Young (Sunpiper Media Publishing)

Pastor Stuart Kerr relocates his family to a little mountain town where he, his wife, and their children witness the divine coincidences of God and the lurking deceptions of evil. The children unknowingly are swept deep into the world of pornography in this harrowing yet uplifting story of the resilient and resourceful deliverance God gives to his faithfully unaware. (Religious Fiction)

by Brandy Lea Carter (Allwrite Publishing)

As a former lesbian, the Christian author dispels the myth that a woman can please another woman better than a man can. She shares her multi-orgasm techniques that encompass far more than just foreplay. (Love/Sex/Marriage)

The Dictates of Destiny by Royce Hall (Sid Harta Publishers)

From bizarre happenings in his life and close brushes with death, Hall comes to believe he is being watched over by a guardian angel for the express purpose of imparting a message of great significance on behalf of the Creator. This compelling read is told with pathos, candor, and philosophical wit. (Biography/Autobiography)

by Tami Hotard (Helm Publishing)

A well-intentioned reporter becomes a story chaser in love with the joie de vivre of one man, Pat O’Brien, inventor of the Hurricane cocktail. Surrounded by moral decay, addiction, and unreliable sources, the author, often inebriated herself, struggles to stay focused, and be as respectful as a noble savage can be. (Biography/Autobiography)

The Lost Epistle of Jesus by Evan Drake Howard (Xulon Press)

Nothing terrifies Judith Silva more than the prospect of a passionless marriage. She knows she must choose: Does she love Dismas Latronum, the passionate Zealot, or his brother Gabriel, the sensitive merchant? All three seem doomed to jealousy, rage, and despair–until they read an epistle written by an insightful Galilean Rabbi. (Fiction)

by Elizabeth MacDonald Burrows (Seaboard Press)

The author describes the journey of a modern corporate womans search for God, which leads her into the greatest heights of mystic vision–oneness with the Creative Principal of the Universe, known as Cosmic Consciousness. This work takes the reader beyond the portals of mortality to reveal an unseen kingdom that few on earth have experienced. (Biography/Autobiography)

by Jazz Catrell (Prioritybooks Publications)

Catrell pens a hard-hitting erotic tale about a woman conflicted between pursuing a coworker or maintaining her marriage. After she hires Travis, Jessica finds herself changing from upstanding and happily married to an oversexed, overheated, and hot between the legs adulteress. (Adult Fiction)

by Alan Grossman (Piera Press)

Set in a New York corporate world threatened by apocalyptic fire, this story focuses on a business tycoon and a "freak" janitor who compete for love from the same woman and for immortality. (Fiction)

This item is Not Returnable

Die, My Love, Kathryn Casey, Harper True Crime, $7.99

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – to me good books are all about CHARACTER. I don’t care if the characters in question are "sympathetic" or not, I just demand that they be interesting and credible, and nothing proves this literary maxim more than the genre generally considered the least literary, True Crime. In most True Crime there isn’t the standard intermediary of the virtuous detective mediating between the reader and the horrible deed, there’s just the victim, the institutions of justice, and most crucially, the criminal. The hook for True Crime is the inevitable question Who would do a thing like that? In the right hands, the reader can understand the person and their character, the flaws that brought them to cross the line, and, while not condoning it, can even begin to be able to conceive of the unthinkable.

Ann "Golden" Rule is the ruler and yardstick of this world, and it was really her encounter with Ted Bundy, a man she called friend until she learned he was a serial killer, that gave her the insight to elevate a True Confessions type scribbler into the triumphant author of the ground breaking The Stranger Beside Me and from there to a string of excellent and best selling True Crime, the latest of which Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder of Betrayal, is hitting the stores just as you read this. It’s the realization that even worst monsters are fellow humans that gives the best of contemporary True Crime its depth and fascination.

One of the new writers who successfully follows the Rule template is Kathryn Casey, author of She Wanted It All and now Die, My Love. Both books have the central character of a histrionic, narcissistic, amoral, immature, attractive, magnetic train wreck of a woman who ends up wounding everyone around her. You get to know Die, My Love’s Piper Jablin so well that you start thinking of her by her first name, and become sincerely grateful that you never met her. If there was ever a case of opposites attracting it was in her ill-starred marriage to her older professor Fred Jablin. He was a very organized, very conscientious, well, wonk, and she was a free spirit, artistic and spontaneous, but totally undisciplined. Whatever chemistry brought them together soon dissolved in the face of her wild spending, inability to hold a job, unfaithfulness, financial chicanery and total lack of guilt. Yet Fred tried to hold on to his marriage and the three children it produced, rationally exploring their problems, believing that his beloved logical reasoning could succeed with a person whose mental processes were as disordered as Piper’s. When he finally gave up, he used his powerful, disciplined methods to successfully get an alimony free divorce and gain custody of his children.

Piper was such a supreme egotist that she thought she didn’t have to work and expected to be constantly catered to. She considered herself a great Mom because she liked to play with her children like another child, even though she was unable to do the adult things like get them to school or the doctor’s. She felt unfairly persecuted when other people didn’t agree with her, and when that person was a judge that she couldn’t bully with her usual hysteria, a murderous rage against Fred was born, enabled by her similarly disturbed family. And of course a murderous plan conceived by the superior genius she considered herself to be could never be detected by those dolts the police, could it?

I always check a True Crime book to see when the trial begins. The later in the book the better, because trials are mostly about the lawyers and their competing scenarios, and often have little to do with the real crime and its perpetrator. If the rest of the canvas is presented clearly enough, the trial is just another detail and Casey gets that part of the formula right too, preferring a novelistic accumulation of history, biography and day to day details rather than sensational journalistic reportage of public events. The bad guys in mysteries are often inconsistently drawn plot devices who exist to surprise the reader when their identity is revealed, or stock serial killers who kill for overly conceptualized reasons. If you want to meet a real villain read Die, My Love because Piper Jablin is the kind of person who would do something like that.