The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Malpertuis by Jean Ray
Gordon McAlpine

Jean Ray. Malpertuis. Trans. and introduction by Iain White. Atlas, 1998. 172 pp. Paper: $16.99.

The new English translation of Malpertuis, a novel of gothic delights by Jean Ray first published in France in 1943, offers a sojourn to a literary landscape not much cultivated these days—a dark place of rich language and imagery where the concerns of the contemporary (be it existential angst or complex psychological entanglements) are subordinated to a more ancient and—in some ways—exuberant approach to storytelling. This is not to say that the book lacks psychological depth; indeed, its primary narrator, a young man named Jean-Jacques, ultimately tells a tragic story of family relations and coming-of-age with a distracted unself-consciousness that makes these elements all the more powerful. Rather, it is simply that Malpertuis is so unabashedly a tale best told “on a dark and stormy night,” which sets it apart from what we expect of most modern literary fiction. This is the novel’s greatest charm: its willingness to revel in its own gothic excesses.
Malpertuis is the name of an ancient stone house that is haunted by creatures whose true nature is not revealed until the book’s dramatic and satisfying conclusion. Like Poe’s House of Usher, Malpertuis embodies the darkness of its inhabiting family’s secrets. Nonetheless, doom and darkness does not make reading the book a gloomy experience. As in the best gothic fiction, the vitality of the author’s imagination and language insures against that. Truth is, reading Malpertuis is fun. “The horrible stench of anagyris, the thrice accursed plant,” Ray writes in the novel’s first pages, wherein a mariner encounters a mysterious island, “came to him from that mortal land, already so close at hand, and he knew that impure spirits were involved in his adventure . . .” What’s not to like about a story of impure spirits, well told? [Gordon McAlpine]