New Books In Literature

Pungently sensual, Claude Lalumiere‘s Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (Guernica Editions, 2017), is a carnal carnival ride, circling around the central conceit. There’s a city-state by the name of Venera, a place where an opium-like drug called vermillion grows. Lalumiere’s work is reminiscent of the French poet, Rimbaud, who write in his poem Larme, “What did I draw from the gourd of the wine? Some golden liquor, pale, which causes sweating.” The novel consists of a collection of stories, linked by people’s experiences of Venera and its inhabitants. The stories are visceral, intense, and tinged with melancholy. Though almost uniformly erotic, the sexual configurations rarely seem based on romance or love, although love is alluded to. Instead there is an almost reflexive instinct in the various protagonists to give themselves over to their appetites. The regular values of a bourgeois society—the accumulation of property, the maintenance of family, the adherence t