Description
From the beginning of childhood the mouth of Lili Dorziat was a source of scandal. It did not belong on a child’s face. There was something irredeemable licentious about this mouth – a provocation to butcher and baker, and even to Lili’s unlucky father, the master horologer whose celebrated clocks began to take on a libidinous aspect which propriety count not condone.
A convent could muster no defence against the mouth’s charming vulgarity. Nor could the five men in Lili’s life who each betrayed himself through his own peculiar weakness while Lili almost passively incited his doom. A clotheswear industrialist succumbed to an obsession with mutilation. An armaments tycoon fatally sampled the world of humiliation in which he dealt. A Catalan communist turned bestselling pornographer, and suicidal gambler. A fascist image-maker developed a carbuncle so grotesque it was deemed intolerable to Il Duce’s empire. A bastion of the old order of rural paternalism yielded to a profound confusion which ultimately rendered him transvestite. Never had the insolence of one mouth undone so many.
Swinging between Gothic irony and the moralizing farce of Preston Sturges, slapstick metaphysics and digressionary speculation, Osborne’s satire intoxicates the reader – and lends startling new meaning to the term oral history.
Lawrence Osborn is the author of a novel, Ania Malina, and a work of non-fiction, Paris Dreambook. He has lived in Paris for many years.
Hardcover, 232 pages. In excellent pre-loved condition.