Tuesday evening. With Claudia Andrei to the French Institute in South Kensington, for a Dedalus Books event. It’s round the corner from the Natural History Museum, beautifully underlit with its terracotta coloured bricks and animal gargoyles, like something from a Dedalus book itself.
Three of their most recent publications are aired: Alice The Sausage by Sophie Jabes, Paris Noir by Jacques Yonnet and The Decadent Handbook. Rowan Pelling hosts, and there’s readings from the Handbook by two gentlemen called Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. They are rather arch and funny performers (as opposed to readers), though the solemn audience barely responds. Even the NASA instructions for how to urinate in space – a 20-point list involving the intricate manipulation of valves and attachments – fails to elicit an audible chuckle. The crowd seemingly wants to be lectured, not entertained.
Rowan Pelling points out that after the recent purchase of Serpent’s Tail by Profile Books, Dedalus remains one of the last truly independent UK publishers with a distinctive identity. The most recent title, Alice The Sausage, is a typically outre new novel about sex and food, in their Euro Shorts series. The criteria for the series being ‘short European fiction which can be read from cover to cover on Eurostar or on a short flight.’ It’s an idea that deserves an award in itself.
The event is held in the Institute’s library, so we’re surrounded by shelves of white spines, the trait of most French language paperbacks. The occasional black spine is usually something in English, and more often than not from the Dedalus catalogue. The nearest black spine to my seat is The Dedalus Book Of 19th Century French Horror. It falls open at a scene from a Dumas tale, Solange, where a guillotined woman’s head is found to be still alive.
I meet a Delon-esque young Frenchman wearing boots covered in golden, ornate patterns. The toes are cloven.
