Shelf Awareness
The Neversink Library
Melville House's
recently launched Neversink Library (named after the frigate in Herman
Melville's White Jacket)
is ferreting out books that most of us have never seen and bringing them to
readers in handsome editions at reasonable prices. Among the first 22 titles: My Autobiography by
Charlie Chaplin, A Country
Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Polyglots by William Gerhardie and I Await the Devil's Coming
by Mary MacLane.
One of the long-lost novels is The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice
Dekobra. Such was its popularity upon publication in 1927 that Dekobra's prose
style earned its own adjective, dekobrisme.
Originally published in French and translated by Neal Wainwright, the novel
details the travails of Lady Diana Wynham, faced with the prospect of financial
ruin. She and her secretary, Prince Gerard Séliman, the perfect gentleman, must
find a way to regain the fortune that Lady Diana needs to preserve her way of
life. The adventures of poor Gerard are interspersed with Dekobra's
encyclopedic knowledge of the world just after the Russian Revolution, and how
badly it has shaken Europe.
Gerard must face spies,
old and new loves, secret police and all the hazards to hygiene that a true
gentleman abhors. And why is Lady Diana called the Madonna of the Sleeping
Cars? Because she boards trains in search of her next sponsor--and is always
successful.
The novel was so popular
that several authors mention Dekobra and The
Madonna in their own books, like Alan Furst did in The Foreign Correspondent:
"The dark adventures of Lady Diana Wynham, siren of the Orient express,
bed-hopping from Vienna to Budapest, with stops at every European watering
place."
Surely a book well
worth resurrecting. --Valerie Ryan,
Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.
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