
Waystations of the Deep Night - Marcel Brion
Waystations of the Deep Night by Marcel Brion / ISBN 9781939663504 / 256-page paperback with flaps from Wakefield Press / Translated by George MacLennan and Edward Gauvin *** A canonical gem of the nocturnal fantastic, in the tradition of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Novalis First published in France in the dark year of 1942, the story collection Waystations of the Deep Night remains the best-known of Marcel Brion’s numerous novels and stories in the vein of the strange and the fantastic. The journeys in this volume carry the reader through the surreal vistas of an underground city that appears aboveground as a bizarre theater of facades and a fire-ravaged landscape where souls turn to ash. A young castrato sings his heart out in a lost baroque garden; a child falls under the fateful spell of an enchanted painting; a traveler in a burned-out landscape encounters the Prince of Death; and dancing cats engage in mortal combat in the cellars of an abandoned port city. A sel