My first encounter with this visionary artist (who developed his art in the most varied manifestations of figurative expression, from painting to illustration, from engraving to photography, from sculpture to theatrical set design, from film to music, from literature to television - one cannot fail to mention here at least his participation as an actor in Herzog's Nosferatu -), a Frenchman of Polish descent, was more than two decades ago.
A high school friend lent me a rare volume of his macabre tales: black fairy tales with strong visionary components in which unthinkable grotesque characters materialized-emblematically, a coarse old turquoise fairy who grants wishes according to her own sadistic whims-in an atmosphere that only a drunken, visionary Dino Buzzati who had injected himself with a dose of Hoffman while he was assembling a synaedrium with the ghosts of Bosch, Goya and Salvator Rosa could conceive. It was love at first sight.
It took ten years before I was able to get hold of more of this brilliant French artist's writings. In a dusty bookstore I came across this novel (from which Roman Polanski made a film in 1976 starring Isabelle Adjani, necessarily inferior to the book from which it is based).
And it was like catching up with an old friend.
Reading one of Topor's writings is like immersing oneself in one of his paintings, being lapped by visionary atmospheres endowed with a dark seductive intoxicating charge.
The parallel with Dino Buzzati that I drew was not accidental. I do not know whether the two came into contact (I doubt it), but this is not a relevant detail; of importance, however, is Topor's writing, which possesses remarkable points of contact with that of the Belluno writer. Buzzati's sharpness and grim irony here are taken to excess, transfigured, tinged with black and grotesque. It is like looking into a mirror that reproduces a mocking distorted image, impossible to grasp.
It is the obscene seductive fingers of restlessness that penetrate the most unmentionable recesses of human nature, buried fantasies, opening wide sepulchers of imagination.
The story is told with visionary mastery, we gradually enter the grotesque atmospheres painted with sadistic complacency, the atmosphere is created scene after scene darkening its hues until there is no longer any way out in the obsessive spiral created, exactly as happens in Buzzati's masterpiece Seven Floors.
The plot of Le Locatarie Chimérique (this is the play's original title) sees a Polish immigrant, Mr. Trelkovsky, renting an apartment in Paris suddenly vacated by the suicide of his tenant, Simonetta Choule, who inexplicably threw herself out of the window.
What Trelkovsky considers a real stroke of luck will gradually reveal the rot that lies beneath the surface. In spite of himself, the protagonist finds himself losing his friends because of the neighbors' complaints about the too much hubbub that he - a polite and reserved person - seems to procure; obsession begins to lay its relentless hands on Trelkovsky, and when thieves break into his apartment and steal any object that might reveal his identity, the man realizes that he is at the center of a terrible plot. Simonetta Choule did not commit suicide: she was driven to that act by the building's creepy tenants, who now plan to replicate the scene with him.
Why do those people act that way? Who are those figures actually? Who is actually hiding behind the presences he glimpses from the window of his own apartment and who in the communal bathroom do nothing but stand motionless for hours like he automatons? Whose tooth is the one found in a cavity in his own room?
These are questions I will not provide an answer to, but they will be revealed by the book until the masterful, disturbing epilogue.
Be seduced by the black humor of one of the most multifaceted artists who ever lived.
Published by Bompiani, coll. paperbacks - pp. 159 - price 7.00 euro
Reviewed by Ian
