The Necrophiliac

I’ve read plenty of controversial books and this one takes the cake. Although beautifully written and well translated it’s pretty shocking. I’d recommend it just to have it under your belt. It took me about an hour to read it solely because I kept having to set it down to gather my thoughts😂 10/10⭐️

Well... I'm giving this novella 4 stars because if you purchased it to learn more about what makes a necrophiliac tick, this surely gives you the variations and positions, etc. For that reason 4 stars; 1 star removed for trying to sell this as beautiful poetry...As poetry... you can put lipstick on a pig and it will still be a pig. The book is written in diary form and tells the story of Lucien, an antique store owner who grave robs, takes the dead back to his apartment and has sex (lots of sex) with them until they become so putrid that they stink up his apartment...and him...then dumps them in the Seine. Sounds a little like a serial killer to me except that they are already dead.He is not picky, he has no preference (man, woman, child, perfect, deformed) they need only be dead...he is a hedonist.I had just finished reading "Undying Love " by Ben Harrison about Count Carl Von Cosel who preserved and slept with his dead true love for seven years before he was caught. That was an excellent story which told the reader what his motivations were and how they were accomplished. He was someone you could feel pity for...I felt none for Lucien; he felt none for his dead partners.This book was just sleazy and cheesey trying to pass itself as poetry. If you're just curious about the hows of necrophilia this book covers it all. If you're looking for poetry look elsewhere.

This book was beautiful, morbid, poetic, gross, and definitely not for the faint of heart. I went in completely blind. Because the synopsis compared this book to Poe and Baudelaire, I expected murder and a slow and subtly disturbing ambiance. I also assumed the title was a metaphor. I was mistaken. By the end of the second paragraph I was thoroughly shocked, and I paused to consider whether or not I wanted to continue reading. I did.This author is kind of brilliant in my opinion. She imagines the life of a man who is a romantic, a bit of a poet, a perfectionist, refined (or at least considers himself to be), and is completely obsessed and sexually aroused by death. I have not read many books that have successfully woven together horrific acts with beauty, but this was by the far the best. If you can tolerate a highly descriptive dive into this subject, you should definitely read this book!

A well translated book of taboos and shocking activity. Don’t read it if you are easily offended or faint of heart. Graphic detail of love with multiple corpses. This novel was well translated from its original French and still kept the maddening displays within.

Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac was originally published in France in 1972, but only recently was it translated into English. This short novella is related in the form of a journal, in which the narrator recounts his various sexual encounters with dead people, including children.Because of its style and subject matter, Wittkop's story asks to be judged alongside its literary peers, demanding admittance to a literary subculture that combines the transgressive practice of pornography with a serious philosophical investigation into the overlapping themes of life and death. One does not, after all, read works like this for the sake of titillation. Despite its sexually explicit themes, The Necrophiliac is intensely focused on the theme of how death shapes our understanding of life's purpose.So just who are Wittkop's putative peers? Obviously, there is the Marquis de Sade who, in works like  The 120 Days of Sodom  and  Philosophy in the Bedroom , combined sexual cruelty with a probing examination of the meaning of life in a godless universe. From the nineteenth-century, we might single out Edgar Allan Poe who, while hardly pornographic in the traditional sense, nonetheless demonstrates an intense interest in perversity, as well as Charles Baudelaire, whose poem "The Corpse" (from  The Flowers of Evil ) seems particularly relevant here. In the twentieth-century, the obvious representative would be Georges Bataille, whose novella  Story of the Eye  is a masterpiece of intellectual pornography.The enduring fascination of those earlier works lies in the adventurous way in which they pushed the boundaries not only of taste, but also of thought, in new directions. It is a sensation I didn't get from reading The Necrophiliac which, given its original publication date of 1972, seems like a pale imitation of those earlier writers. Taken on its own, it is a stylish, accomplished piece of fiction, but when placed in the larger context of the genre, it can only be seen as a minor work.

This piece of work is a literarily stunning composition of some of the most vile first-hand (fictional) accounts of depravity I’ve ever read. Like a Victorian-leaning action-adventure periodical, set in a nondescript time, where the main character is actually a disgusting, grave-robbing sexual predator and necrophiliac... and we’re forced to watch as his prose settles like a rain cloud of spores on our minds.Where the need for this lies in today’s society, I don’t know. I understand the way-back ways of stunning vocabulary acrobatics, since that’s somewhat how they talked back then. But this florid prose being written only in the 1970s seriously escapes me. It presents itself as immediately pretentious, and then just dribbles in enough pretty words to attract us, before committing heinous acts of indecency.So now I guess this is in my head for good, then. Great. Just great. But I admit - I did this to myself. And you likely will, or already have, too. Curiosity is a bitch.

Lucien is an antique dealer, a French gentleman, and a necrophiliac. The book is told from the first person perspective in diary form as we follow Lucien's dark adventures robbing graves and taking back the recently interred back to his home where his actions with them are described in unflinching detail.There isn't much else to the story - the types of dead people changes such as going from a young woman, to an older woman, to a man, to a child, and to a mother and her baby. Each encounter is described tenderly in the style of a romance novel except that one of the (unwilling) participants is dead.Gabrielle Wittkop does try to explain her protagonist's behaviour but I found her explanation to be a bit pat. Lucien masturbates for the first time shortly before his grandmother tells him his mother has died and that he must say goodbye. As he kisses the corpse of his mother he forever links the two things together - sexuality and death; a bit too convenient, no? I think the reality of the mind of a necrophiliac would be less logical than that to the point that their behaviour and their choices would be unexplainable and utterly confounding to the ordinary person.Lucien is a fascinating person though. At times he appears strangely normal as he goes about his ordinary daytime life. At horrifying moments, like when he's with a dead infant, he clearly sets down what he believes to be the distinctions between himself and an infamous French medieval nobleman called Gilles de Rais who raped and murdered children.I think the shortness of the book (83 pages on smaller than average pages) helps the book as I don't think I could have finished it at even twice the length. The repeated trysts that Lucien describes with the various corpses are both distasteful and dreary to read by the end of the book and the lack of a plot means the reader is left with descriptions of putrefying bodies and Lucien's methods of maintaining the bodies for days on end.Wittkop has created an original character in Lucien while gifting him with an eloquent voice that never fails to disturb. Her writing is truly high quality and the book is easy to read for that reason, while being difficult to read because of the subject matter. The Necrophiliac is a morbidly engrossing read that anyone interested in horror or gothic literature might want to check out. There certainly aren't many books like this out there!

Story was very lacking but I still really enjoyed it, when I say lacking I mean there isn't enough of it. I wish there was more of this book.I struggle to finish books but this one I could not put down.

Thanks

Ho appena finito di leggerlo e sono ancora sottosopra. Non è una lettura per tutti, bisogna avere uno stomaco forte. Detto questo, l’autrice riesce a farci entrare nel mondo di un necrofilo in modo poetico e incredibilmente romantico. Sì, romantico, perchè quest’uomo si innamora dei corpi che possiede, li tratta con una tenerezza che commuove, e soffre atrocemente quando deve separarsene per forza di cose. Macabro, bellissimo, brillante, una scrittura che cattura. Da leggere assolutamente!

Per gli amanti di antieroi lirici come il Maldoror di Ducasse o del Jean-Baptiste Grenouille di Patrick Suskind, questo breve libro farà la vostra gioia.L'argomento è già espresso nella copertina, il nostro antieroe Lucien è un'altra di quelle peculiari anime perse da inserire nel gotha assieme ai suoi due illustri compagni per efferatezza ed amore. Una storia scritta in forma di diario in prima persona ci dà l'impressione di aver trovato questo testo per sbaglio, di essere a nostra volta dei voyeur... scelte linguistiche più che efficaci, trama chiara, discesa nella dannazione garantita.Testo in inglese.