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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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
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About the Author
Guillaume Lecasble was born in 1954. He started painting at the age of 19 and had a first solo exhibition eleven years later. From his art work – and particularly the portrait of a chorus of monks - he became inspired to experiment with new approaches to film making. Various short films yielded a pair of characters (bonhomme & bonfemme) who then reincarnated themselves in a series of highly praised books for children. Painting continues to inspire and accompany his written and cinematographic work. Lobster, his first novel, was published to critical acclaim in France in 2003. His second novel, Cut, was published in 2004.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Images start coming back to him the simmering stock, the way his eyes were scalded by the steam, and of course that smell of bay leaves. After that it all goes black, right until his awakening in this cold salty seawater. Alive! He's got to accept that he's alive, despite his shell having the smell and colour of death. Right in front of him, Angelina is bent over, her hands purple from the cold, trying to break Maurice's fingers. She's not getting anywhere. Sudden death and freezing water have paralysed his sinews and fused his bones together. In one fluid movement she stands up, flicks back her tousled hair and pins it up with a brooch from her dress. Lobster recognises her, thinks ''she's the one who ate my dad''. Unknown feelings brew in him. Vengeance and desire make his flesh tingle in a way he's never felt before. He's attracted to this woman. He, a lobster, attracted to a woman. He comes closer, the better to see. The better to clarify this shocking situation. Angelina's beauty is enough to bring on fevers, and Lobster feels one mounting in him. His body heats up, but it doesn't stop his craving for vengeance. He doesn't know what to do for the first time he is being forced to use his reason, rather than his instinct. Angelina was so nervous, so frozen and exasperated by the stiffness of the corpse clutching at her life that she didn't notice Lobster's feelers brushing against her ankles.
