Maurice SandozBesprekingen

Bizarre little book. Four stories and a bogus preface which sets the stage for all four. The stories either take place in an asylum in Tunis, or use this asylum as a framing device, much like "club" tales. In the first story the guy needs, um, a little head. So he can get a little head. No, seriously, he needs to get a shrunken head to keep his girlfriend happy. It turns out to be easier than you would think. Then the next guy thinks he is Jesus. This leads to some emotional problems for the narrator. Later another guy gets stuck in a swimming pool for a long time and it makes him go crazy. The last guy tells the narrator that he's not insane but wants to get that way because crazy people have access to more ideas than the sane. Then when this last guy convinces the narrator that God is dead, he (the narrator) gets his own stay in the Big House in Tunis. I hear it's nice.

There is just the right blend of humor and horror in each of these stories

Illustrated by Salvador Dali it is difficult to see how this ever got published by a mainstream publisher in 1950. Now I need to find the dust jacket...

Maurice Sandoz seems to have been a fairly popular and successful writer in his day, with his work translated into several languages, but books now seem to be remembered only for the Dali illustrations, which have made them highly collectable. This volume seems to be his rarest, for reasons that are all too obvious.

"The House Without Windows" is a rather baffling narrative about an ubermensch figure (perhaps Sandoz himself?) living in a bizarre palace by a Swiss lake who may or may not have committed a murder. I could make little of it, and the tale didn't seem justified by the telling. I can only assume that it is a roman a clef that would have meant something to Sandoz' circle.

Maurice Sandoz seems to have been a fairly popular and successful writer in his day, with his work translated into several languages, but books now seem to be remembered only for the Dali illustrations, which have made them highly collectable.

"Fantastic Memories" is a slim volume of rather fragmentary tales, presented as reminiscences of a Decadent aristocrat. The stories are slight in themselves, but are well-written, perverse and deeply odd, with a uniquely strange flavour that has led me to search out all of Sandoz' other fiction. Sandoz, a scion of the pharmaceuticals dynasty who supplied legal LSD to the medical profession into the mid-sixties, seems to have been a complex character, from the scant information I have been able to glean from the site of the charitable foundation that bears his name. I'd like to know more.

Maurice Sandoz seems to have been a fairly popular and successful writer in his day, with his work translated into several languages, but books now seem to be remembered only for the Dali illustrations, which have made them highly collectable.

"The Maze" is his best novel, a treatment of the "Monster of Glamis" legend of a stately home with a sinister secret. Overheated, Gothic and faintly Lovecraftian it was the subject of a 1953 3D movie by William Cameron Menzies. By all accounts, the film is dreadful, but the book is an obscure treasure, and the Dali illustrations are particularly fine.

Maurice Sandoz seems to have been a fairly popular and successful writer in his day, with his work translated into several languages, but books now seem to be remembered only for the Dali illustrations, which have made them highly collectable.

This is a slim volume of short weird tales. Although I found the rest of the collection very weak in comparison to exquisitely Decadent "Fantastic Memories", the lead story "The Tsanta" is truly bizarre, and perhaps the best thing Sandoz ever wrote.