Roberte Ce Soir: And the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (French Literature) [Paperback]

Pierre Klossowski (Author), Austryn Wainhouse (Translator), Michael Perkins (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: French Literature | Publication Date: February 2002

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

"Pornography with intellectual pretensions," said LJ's reviewer of this 1969 double volume, which was the first English translation of these works. Both texts offer a plethora of psychosexual banter and situations. "Liberal libraries with avant-garde aspirations might want to acquire this." (LJ 4/1/69)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A metaphysical sex novel." -- Publishers Weekly

"Klossowski has a curiously kinky mind and considerable skill." -- Virginia Quarterly Review

"Klossowski leaves the reader with the impression that he is amused rather than anguished by these apparently unresolvable human dilemmas." -- Choice

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 214 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; 1 edition (February 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156478309X
• ISBN-13: 978-1564783097
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #346,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Neo-Scholastic discourse attempts erotic frisson, September 10, 2007

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roberte Ce Soir: And the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (French Literature) (Paperback)

This reads, perhaps as if a leering monologue inspired by Beckett doubled in translation from French to English, like a parody of a French intellectual's one-handed amusement. Here, scholastic philosophy thickens into stultifying langour what fleetingly reminds me of tamer moments of Pauline Reage's "The Story of O" with more than a hint of the artistic studies of awkward erotic acrobatics that both Klossowski and his brother, "Balthus," delighted in.

Since the tales do involve sex, I admit that parts intrigue me. Yet the naughty bits are few and far between. Little remains in the mind after reading many pages at a time. The pace slows, the plot staggers. There is a story buried in the second novella about the fall of Rome in 1944 that hints at a mixture of Kafka and "Open City," Sartre and "The Night Porter" through an atmosphere charged with tension, but even this energy lessens under thousands of words of unrelieved speculation and intellectual discussion. This is not fiction so much as sketches. Suitably, if not altogether satisfactorily, Octave and Roberte keep journals-- hers notably closer to "O" and his nearer Sade crossed with Bataille (his mentor). Klossowski appears to tell us an elaborate setup, only to dupe us whenever we think we're getting nearer a punchline or a money shot. This delayed and postponed climax provides the form of the novellas and their content, but the sexual struggles under the philosophical. So, aesthetically this fiction can be explained, but it's not Anais Nin or even Violette Leduc. It's far more erudite, less erotic.

Less engaging in realization than conception proves the endless neo-Thomist softcore in the first tale, expressing Octave's wish for his wife Roberte to open herself to any guest's lubricious "male gaze" and fawning caresses. This is an intriguing idea, a spin on what this fiction combined with others was issued as "The Laws of Hospitality" and which is partially translated here. But, this will titillate few readers with its vocabulary of "sedcontra" and "quidest," amidst much learned banter of austerity, essence, accident, substance, and actuality.

As an ex-Dominican seminarian turned scholar of Sade & Nietzsche, the formidably learned author may be writing more for his own delight in such rarified discourse than his reader. We truly are "incurable heirs of Augustinian Manicheism" (99) in our difficulty in rendering to the body what the flesh craves while serving the power of the spirit, and I understand Klossowski's mission as expressed by seductive Roberte "the Censor" and her erstwhile keeper Octave as stand-ins for Klossowski and his real-life wife! But, these paired novellas from 1953 & 1959 remain often too inert, too rarified. Like Sade, they jolt between high-end rationalization and low-end (if more willing here from Roberte's p-o-v) expropriation. But, unlike say Beckett at his best or Sartre in his fiction, the narrative often stalls and fails to ignite. What could have been exciting in its exploration of where the carnal swirls into the divine appears too haphazardly constructed and tediously conveyed.

This book may pay re-reading. But my interest failed rapidly after pages of theological language obscured the potency of the body and the potential of the soul to break through the confines of the erotic. Klossowski's on to brilliant material, but at least in English, the prose is too clotted and the arguments too enamored of their own cleverness. He forgets the reader needs to be enticed by images rather than bludgeoned by ideas. The potential or actual (!) subset of those able to enjoy scholasticism and endlessly delayed, teasingly meticulous voyeurism I estimate as rather limited.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia, April 22, 2011

By 

Joseph Suglia "The Greatest Author in the World" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roberte Ce Soir: And the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (French Literature) (Paperback)

A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

ROBERTE CE SOIR and THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES: two religious-erotic/erotic-religious novels from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Pierre Klossowski.

ROBERTE CE SOIR: Who is Roberte? To her nephew, Antoine, she is an austere and sexually prepossessing older sister. To her husband, Octave, she is an infuriatingly beguiling hostess. To any guest who traverses the threshold of their home, she is an open receptable for virility---strangely inaccessible and accessible at once. But Roberte is nothing, strictly speaking, in herself: she is a ceaselessly multiplying play of masks. Her self-multiplications enlarge infinitely. Purely mutative, purely transformative---who is she, really, in herself? To every man she encounters, she is the replica of his desires.

Her sin, according to Octave (and the narrative!), is to have separated the spirit from the body. She is (according to Octave) both atheist (exclusive of the spirit) and a censor (exclusive of physicality). Quite appropriately, the prose is, at times, erotically informed (emblematical of the body); at others, theologically informed (emblematical of the spirit).

THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES: In this second novel, Roberte speaks in her own language. We see her free from the one-sided interpretations that men have imposed upon her. No, she never separates the word from the flesh. She is word and flesh at once; like Klossowski's God, she is eminently communicable, absolutely self-transformative, the hypostatical union of three-in-one. And she never denied God, only the idol that men have made of God (God as an immutatable and incommunicable substance).

THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES revokes every hypothesis that may be imposed on Roberte, Klossowski's muse and God. Like a tableau vivant (a living painting, a human sculpture), she dangles silently in space.

The latter fiction folds upon the former. Together, they form a cartouche or an envelope.

In these absolutely remarkable books, theological digressions (the spirit) and eroticism (the body) dovetail into a seamless flow of language. Together, they form a metaphysics of the flesh.

Klossowski, my neighbor.

Dr. Joseph Suglia