Every summer, bookshops lay out stacks of blockbusters designed to be devoured in an afternoon and forgotten in a week. But at UnHerd we prefer books that leave a lasting impression. In this series of Summer Reads, our contributors recommend overlooked books that will engage and enrich you, not just distract you.
Let me just come out and say it. Decadent proclivities brought me to The House of Ulloa. My initiation took place in New Cross, South London, at an academic conference where the souvenir tote bags depicted the Goat of Mendes cavorting with a tortoise. In rooms at the Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths College, guests of the Decadence Research Unit gave papers on the literature of auras, telepathy, astral projection and Satanism.
A South Korean Shakespeare professor talked about tantric philosophy and W. B. Yeats’s vasectomy. A dapper Swedish lecturer in religion spoke of Méphistophéla (1890), a French novel in which lesbian demon-worshippers offer baskets of severed penises to a female succubus. A Spanish researcher, Leire Barrera-Medrano, described the fiction of Emilio Pardo Bazán, decadent, feminist, theosophist, aristocrat and the author of The Black Siren (1908), the story of a devil-worshipping dandy with the power to compel people to commit suicide.
I was reeling. Suddenly, Proust’s mental time travel and Freud’s interest in telepathy made sense. Here was the lost, weird context of European modernism. Most of it, frustratingly, untranslated into English.
With one notable exception. Emilio Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa (1886). A novel from her early period, written long before she developed an interest in hypnotism and the Black Mass. Back in the 1880s, she considered herself a naturalist in the style of Flaubert. But she was also a state of the nation novelist. That nation was her native Spain, and its state was decay.
The hero of The House of Ulloa is a mimsy young priest, Father Julián Alvarez, who is despatched to a crumbling estate in the Galician sticks to inject a little order and piety into the affairs of its resident marquis. Some hope.
As he arrives at the manor like a comic, clerical version of Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he sees a dirty four-year-old boy, the marquis’s illegitimate son, being bitten by a dog from whose bowl he has attempted to snatch a hunk of meat. The marquis consoles the lad by sluicing wine down his throat. The boy seems delighted to be drunk. “On certain feast-days,” stammers Father Julián, wondering if he is about to witness a sudden death, “I don’t dislike a little anisette with my coffee.”
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