Customer Reviews

Teleny; or, The Reverse of the Medal

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I took a Yellow Nineties literature course in college, and the professor told us to stay away from "Teleny," that Oscar Wilde had nothing to do with it. With my interest piqued, I went to the university library and discovered there was a copy of "Teleny" in the rare book room. I read it in one sitting. I agreed that Oscar Wilde probably had nothing to do with it.

But now, many years later, I've read it again, and this doesn't even seem like the same text I read before. I will give Oscar Wilde chapter 7 and a long passage of chapter 8. Beyond that, I'm sure many other writers contributed most of it. I just wish an editor had been involved. While reading this version, I concluded that some kind of optical scanner had been used to transfer the text from one source to another. In the process, very strange things happened. The letter "m" often gets subsituted for "th," so that the word "that" appears as "mat." "Mink" is really "think." But it doesn't stop there. "Concerts" becomes "conceits." "Kiss" becomes "lass." The best one is "mush-scented courtesans," which I hope is supposed to be "musk-scented." Add to that the fact that some French words were just guessed at, so we end up with "mignans," "matrons" for "marrons," and "Angut" for "Angot." Anyway, the text is so corrupted that you practically have to be a cryptographer to decipher it some of it.

The early chapters have lots of typical Victorian hetero scenes, but once the homosexual ones start, one must agree that this is a different kind of prose. The literary and classical allusions abound. (Some of them are so obscure that I couldn't find out about them using google search.) There is an attempt at a Poe atmosphere near the end, which is telegraphed from a mile away. The end is "open," with a hint that there might be a sequel, but apparently there never was one.

In all honesty, I cannot recomment this New Traveller's Companion Series version (no pictures) because of the constant typos and bizarre punctuation that render the prose almost unreadable.

Teleny is a homoerotic novel and important antithesis to the prudish idealism of the neo-classic and neo-romantic lyric love poetry of the "fin de siècle". The book about the gay love between the rich Camille and the struggling, but sexy pianist Teleny was published in 1893 in 200 copies. The partially very graphic text is accompanied by tasteful erotic linocuts by Uday K. Dhar (New York).

Excellent writing. Very sexual. If Oscar truely wrote it he had alot of passion. I guess that goes without question.