The City Curious

by Jean de Bosschère

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Genres: Fiction

174 pages, Paperback

Published December 10, 2024

About the author

Jean de Bosschère was a writer, graphic artist and a book illustrator. He illustrated works by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Antonin Artaud. From 1905 onwards he also regularly produced engravings for his own books, such as Édifices anciens (1908), Twelve occupations (1916) and Job le pauvre (1923). He also illustrated his novel Dolorine et les ombres himself. He worked in the 'art nouveau' style, also known as 'Jugendstil' or 'modern style'. The latter term is probably the most appropriate, as De Bosschère's style is most similar to the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). De Bosschère drew lots of waving, ornamental shapes and stylised plants, like Beardsley, and he made clever use of the black-and-white division of the page. The drawings, printed in black ochre in Dolorine et les ombres, testify to De Bosschère's interest in the occult and the obscure.

Reviews

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was crazy. People made of cake, chocolate walls, and a moving prison of sugar spikes. Overall it's a pretty simple story of a couple who go in search of three girls to live in their house and end up in a curious city. Through the book they meet a number of interesting characters and learn of three daughters of the prisoner they may be able to build gardens for. Whether it is a commentary on something specific or just an imaginative exercise, there are numerous instances when the curious city adopts something from the world of Redy and Smaly - humans - but doesn't grasp the concept. The soldiers wear daisies on their boots instead of spurs, and when they find that water is essential to maintaining a fleet they decree that water will be splashed on the side of their boats every day. Jean de Bosschere had a fascination with the obscure and this is evident in this work. I couldn't say I much liked the ending, but I did really enjoy reading this. Available on Project Gutenberg.

[xenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

to return to a mere shapeless thing once again

[Koen Crolla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lewis Carroll Mr. de Bosschère is not. The writing is abysmally like that of a high schooler who is trying far too hard to sound like Poe—the extent to which that's the fault of Tennyson Jesse's translation is debatable, but she certainly deserves some of the blame—and the absurdism, rather than being interesting or satirical or whimsical, is of the spork-holding persuasion.
De Bosschère tried to write one of those children's stories for adults, which is a genre that occasionally produces decent works, but failed miserably on a level Neil Gaiman can only dream of. The only salvageable thing about The City Curious would be the illustrations, which he also did. They aren't earth-shatteringly good, but many of them are certainly interesting.

I'm beginning to think that Belgian writers are just terminally incompetent regardless of the language they write in. At least this one was short and, thanks to Project Gutenberg, free.

[branewurms · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scans of the 1920 English language edition of this book available here.