Lobster [Paperback]

Guillaume Lecasble (Author), Polly Mclean (Author), Polly Mchean (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2006

Aboard the Titanic, Lobster watches Angelina devour his father before being plucked out of the aquarium himself. Just as he is put in the boiling pot, the ship hits the iceberg and the pot is thrown to the floor. Lobster survives, with some changes: he finds himself sexually attracted not only to a human, but to the very human who ate his father. He gives her one lifechanging orgasm before their tragic separation, following an ugly incident in one of the lifeboats. This novel begins a new series from Dedalus called Euro Shorts, short European fiction which can be read from cover to cover on a short flight.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest in Dedalus's Euro Shorts series is a surreal anti-fairy tale featuring a bizarre trio of star-crossed lovers. Plucked rudely from the sea, Lobster finds himself in a tank in the Titanic's dining room, watching in horror as Angelina, a beautiful young opium addict, devours his father. Lobster himself is dropped into boiling water three days later, but is saved when the Titanic hits the iceberg and, red but alive, he's sent careening through the flooding ship. He finds Angelina trapped in the death grip of her male companion, frees her with his pincers, realizes that he feels human lust for her and, in a startling scene, brings her to her first-ever orgasm. They escape to a lifeboat, but Lobster falls overboard, and the book's next movement concerns the lovers' attempts to experience such ecstasy again. Angelina loses her clitoris to the pincers of the wrong lobster, and Lobster, feasting on Titanic dead, befriends Jules, a Newfoundland tattoo artist/fisherman, whom he hopes will somehow take him to Angelina. Meeting Angelina on a ship to France, Jules (who's brought Lobster along in a basket) falls in love with her too. With its fortuitous encounters and near misses, its moments of sweet affection and suicidal despair, Lecasble's tale manages to be both tender and appalling. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Lecasble's first novel marks the latest formal move in a career that has already progressed from painting to filmmaking to children's books. Is it surprising, then, that Lobster is a story of changing forms, like something out of Ovid's Metamorphoses? When the Titanic hits the iceberg, beautiful, morose Angelina is trapped in her elderly escort's death grip, and Lobster is tossed from the pot in which he was to have cooked, reddened but alive. Dazed yet aroused, the crustacean homes in on Angelina, frees her, and brings her to orgasm for the first time ever. Spent, the lovers, psychosexually altered forever, inevitably go separate ways. They do not rationalize away their impossible encounter, however, and each resolves to find the other again. Fisher--tattooist Jules must become accomplice and more before Angelina and Lobster reconsummate. Lecasble has perhaps learned equally from film and Rimbaud the dreamlike impetus of his prose, which sweeps impossibility, and the reader's possible disgust, before it. Ludicrous and macabre, as well as erotic, this is some kind of tour de force. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 110 pages
• Publisher: Dedalus (March 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903517346
• ISBN-13: 978-1903517345
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,158,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)