Melusine

Maurice Magre (1877-1941) was one of the most far-ranging and extravagant French writers of fantastic fiction in the first half of the 20th century, and perhaps the finest of them, because of the fertility and versatility of his imagination and the manner and purpose for which he deployed it. This volume is the eleventh of a series of twelve dedicated to Magre’s works. Melusine(1941) mingles a number of mini-essays and prose-poems with a continuing first-person narrative that, although clearly fictitious and exceedingly rich in the fantastic, is proffered by an unnamed protagonist who is clearly an alter ego of the author. Mélusine might be Magre’s swan song, and its delicate imaginative flourishes the last gasps of his prolific and fecund imagination. His revision of the classic legend of Mélusine of Lusignan is ingenious and the visionary sequences depicting the protagonist’s communications with nature are vividly effective, and demonstrate that Magre’s poetic gifts had not waned.