Gabrielle Wittkop: Murder Most Serene
- Yhteenveto
- Kategoria: muu, ei luokiteltu, alakategoria: muu, ei luokiteltu
- Materiaali: Pokkari
- Kustantaja: Wakefield Pr
- Kieli: englanti
- ISBN: 9781939663146
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- Katseltu: 99 krt
- Suosituksia: 5 kpl
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Kuvaus (238 sanaa, lukemiseen kuluu n. minuutti)
In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. 'Murder Most Serene' offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--'present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins. 'Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an 'intellectual alliance, ' given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, 'The Necrophiliac, ' appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.