Long before George MacDonald and William Morris, Charles de Fieux,
Chevalier de Mouhy (1701-1784), a one-time friend of Voltaire,
prolific author of popular and mildly scandalous potboilers
(including the first sensational novel about the Man in the Iron
Mask) and polemicist, penned one of the first and most extravagant
"Extraordinary Voyages." Lamekis was first published in eight
volumes in 1735-38, then reprinted by Charles-Georges-Thomas
Garnier -- who listed it, arguably, as one of the first Hollow
Earth novels -- in his ground-breaking fantasy imprint of Imaginary
Voyages in 1788. This metafictional novel is an unparalleled work
of kaleidoscopic imagination and multiple, exuberant narratives
focusing on the life and times of Lamekis, the son of a High Priest
of Ancient Egypt. It deals with themes of friendship, unrequited
love, murderous jealousy, violent power struggles, the quest for
immortality and the cosmogonic vision of the universe with
competing gods and levels of reality. Its extravagant settings
include a subterranean world inhabited by a race of intelligent
worm men, and the celestial Island of the Sylphs, where beings can
ascend to the Heavens, all depicted with their strange cultures and
alien languages. The author himself is, at one point, dragged into
the narrative where he is rebuked for his poetic license, given
secret messages, witnesses his unfinished novel as a series of
bas-reliefs, is shown the inside of his mind, is invited to be
initiated into the mysteries of the Sylphs, has the final part of
his novel written for him by an invisible force, and falls foul of
the royal censor. Michael Shreve is a writer and translator
currently living in Paris. His credits include translations of
Jacques Barberi, John-Antoine Nau and Marcel Schwob.
General
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