Books like Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel

Excellent decadent novel: moving and disturbing, with an ending that echoes, in an abstract way, many later horror films and stories.The perversions presented are, by this point in time, passe: mainly a dominant/submissive relationship between a masculine rich woman and her "kept" lover, an already effeminate male artist whom she further feminizes through the course of the novel. This is the crux, but the novel also strays into both vague and specific transvestism, wanton and calculated lust, prostitution, mild and not-so-mild sadism and masochism, drug abuse (Jacques Silvert, the iffeminate artist, is initially made compliant through liberal lashings of hashish), homosexuality, "homsexual panic", and the whole thing winds up as essentially an examination of fetishism in general. I'd also expect that the brash mixing between two "obviously incompatible" classes (the idle rich and the poor gutter dwellers) was probably intended as shocking and perverse as well. In fact, I'd bet this aspect was the most shocking part for some at the time. There's even some implied necrophilia, to end on a sad note, possibly implying the inescapable hopelessness of such rational calculations in matters of the heart (sometimes) and loins (sometimes).I say possibly because the excellent essay which accompanies this novel's appearance in Zone Books' The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France, "Venus in Drag, or Redressing the Discourse of Hysteria: Rachilde's Monsieur Venus" by Janet Beizer, makes a good case that the novel can either be read straight, as a condemnation of its decadent times, or ironically, as a tweaking of society's expectations of those times. The fact that Rachilde was an "innocent" 20-year-old when she wrote it, raised on secret readings of the Marquis de Sade from the forbidden part of her uncle's library, should be calculated in as well.Still, I enjoyed it immensely. Unlike some decadent writing, which consists of vague gestures (with the other hand reflexively covering the mouth in "horror') or lumpen shock tactics, Rachilde's book builds a nice seedy feeling, a generalized perverse and feverish atmosphere of lust and desire gone out of control. No character is an angel or a devil - the poverty stricken Silvert and his scheming streetwalking sister come across as mostly pathetic (I assume that Jacque's lack of masculinity and his inability to engage the code of social etiquette that his "betters" demand probably made him more detestable at the time than now, where such codes are seen for the class & gender control tactics they always were) and while Raoule De Venerande, the main character, is the focus (and thus, presumably, our identifier), what is initially presented as her whim driven by lust, and eventually seen as a full blown romantic/sexual obsession, also scans at times like a childish game played by a member of the spoiled, jaded wealthy classes. A bitter game in which non-privileged, non-people (i.e. the poor) are the pieces to be moved at whim. Which, of course, just makes it more decadent and perverse.It is somewhat humorous to note that Raoule's social equal and possible fiancee, the military man Raittolbe, first guesses her secret new perversion as being lesbianism, only for the suggestion to be met with laughter at how bland and passe that particularly popular "perversion" has become. This in 1884 and yet, modern television's heart still beats quickly at the suggestion of sapphic coupling. The more things change...the stupider people still are.A fun read for the perverse but unjaded. Ignore the "dead-behind-the-eyes" and "more-jaded-than-thou" negative reviews on Amazon.com and come have a febrile wallow. This would make a great, weird, indie movie!