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Flight into Egypt
English, French
- GenresLiterature
Hardcover
First published April 9, 1970
41 people want to read
About the author
Philippe Jullian
69 books13 followersPhilippe Jullian né Philippe Simounet, est un écrivain, dessinateur et graveur, chroniqueur mondain et artistique de son époque.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 6, 2020
French dandy Philippe Julian was an illustrator, art historian, biographer, and occasional writer of fiction. His interests: the morbid, the grotesque, the ornate; homoeroticism, transvestism, sadomasochism; and above all, decadence. And thank you very much Wikipedia for letting me know about all of those sides of him. I would have just left it at "Philippe Julian was super perverted" if it weren't for my good buddy Wikipedia dropping some knowledge on me. And thank you very much Sketchbook for their review of this, which reminded me that I've had this squirreled away for a couple decades, unread. Anyway, it sounds like Julian was a man after my own heart. Although I have yet to mess with transvestism. One of these days...
So yeah this book is what one would call deliciously decadent. It's a dessert dish featured as an entree, followed by more dessert dishes, oh and they are all made of poison. A toxic confection. It is basically a series of stories told to a young Frenchman by a blind Scandinavian beggar in Cairo, recounting that beggar's former life as a bored student abroad who is willingly kidnapped and delivered into a very strange court existing on an Egyptian peninsula. And there he finds that the sex is plentiful (and free!), the days are hot and the nights are cool but um also pretty hot, the men are women, the women are men, the servants are enslaved, the children are for sale, the ruler is one of the last remaining survivors of the Russian aristocracy and her guests are various famous authors & aristocrats & assholes. Eventually, everyone's ridiculous ambitions combined with a ghastly but understandable uprising by those exiled from this court to some awful backyard will cause it all to end in flames, murder, atrocity, and an almost offhand blinding of our poor Nordic stud who should probably have kept his own ambitions in check and escaped long ago with one or more of his girlfriends and some filched royal jewels. Plus the novel features a highly intelligent baboon named Monsieur who is basically the only decent individual in the entire cast.
SPOILER sweet Monsieur survives!
I enjoyed it all well enough. What is it saying? Not much, just appreciate the slow decadent ride. You already know that really really really rich people are capable of doing some really really really fucked up things, and hey the same goes for the middle class people and the poor people as well. Doing really fucked up things to each other is surely a hallmark of the human race.
However I do wish the decadence of the story was matched by equally decadent prose. I kept imagining what someone like Angela Carter could have done with this. Swoon at the thought of all of that overripe prose put in service of such a diabolical narrative! But Julian is an unfortunately dry writer, probably due to his time spent as an historian and biographer. And I don't like my decadence to be served dry, I prefer it overly sauced.
So yeah this book is what one would call deliciously decadent. It's a dessert dish featured as an entree, followed by more dessert dishes, oh and they are all made of poison. A toxic confection. It is basically a series of stories told to a young Frenchman by a blind Scandinavian beggar in Cairo, recounting that beggar's former life as a bored student abroad who is willingly kidnapped and delivered into a very strange court existing on an Egyptian peninsula. And there he finds that the sex is plentiful (and free!), the days are hot and the nights are cool but um also pretty hot, the men are women, the women are men, the servants are enslaved, the children are for sale, the ruler is one of the last remaining survivors of the Russian aristocracy and her guests are various famous authors & aristocrats & assholes. Eventually, everyone's ridiculous ambitions combined with a ghastly but understandable uprising by those exiled from this court to some awful backyard will cause it all to end in flames, murder, atrocity, and an almost offhand blinding of our poor Nordic stud who should probably have kept his own ambitions in check and escaped long ago with one or more of his girlfriends and some filched royal jewels. Plus the novel features a highly intelligent baboon named Monsieur who is basically the only decent individual in the entire cast.
SPOILER sweet Monsieur survives!
I enjoyed it all well enough. What is it saying? Not much, just appreciate the slow decadent ride. You already know that really really really rich people are capable of doing some really really really fucked up things, and hey the same goes for the middle class people and the poor people as well. Doing really fucked up things to each other is surely a hallmark of the human race.
However I do wish the decadence of the story was matched by equally decadent prose. I kept imagining what someone like Angela Carter could have done with this. Swoon at the thought of all of that overripe prose put in service of such a diabolical narrative! But Julian is an unfortunately dry writer, probably due to his time spent as an historian and biographer. And I don't like my decadence to be served dry, I prefer it overly sauced.
May 17, 2015
A surreal and unknown novel that takes its spin from "Thousand and One Nights" with Scheherazade and delivers a bizarre finale - as if you've had 2 or 3 too much of anything you're indiscreet enough to name.
Author Jullian creates an outrageous world in which a young Frenchman finds himself in Cairo, hanging around the Hilton, "which resembles the set of a spy film; moral standards fall the nearer one gets to the big hotels." (Always true). He meets a bearded Viking, about 30, who is a beggar and also blind. The beggar begins his tales of an abduction in which he had to serve as a stud to a sybaritic colony known as "Ici" where he met the Grand Duchess Olga, T E Lawrence and Baron Corvo.
The shangri-la with its shenanigans is the travel prospectus
for an insulting trip in which the Viking discovers that
"he can satisfy passions unknown at his university." He takes us
on a shameless fantasy of plunder & pleasure while Jullian
presents a satire of erotic and literary manners. The tongue is firmly in check and in cheek.
Author Jullian creates an outrageous world in which a young Frenchman finds himself in Cairo, hanging around the Hilton, "which resembles the set of a spy film; moral standards fall the nearer one gets to the big hotels." (Always true). He meets a bearded Viking, about 30, who is a beggar and also blind. The beggar begins his tales of an abduction in which he had to serve as a stud to a sybaritic colony known as "Ici" where he met the Grand Duchess Olga, T E Lawrence and Baron Corvo.
The shangri-la with its shenanigans is the travel prospectus
for an insulting trip in which the Viking discovers that
"he can satisfy passions unknown at his university." He takes us
on a shameless fantasy of plunder & pleasure while Jullian
presents a satire of erotic and literary manners. The tongue is firmly in check and in cheek.
December 19, 2020
A Frenchman on vacation in Cairo encounters a blind Scandinavian beggar; the beggar intrigues the Frenchman with a series of licentious stories of his former past as indulgent blonde and handsome Nordic student, willingly kidnapped while in Cairo and brought into a decadent court in the middle of the Egyptian desert.
Each encounter is furtive, either hidden in streets' corners, tombs, hammam, each story is told in exchange for a monetary contribution, which leaves the reader doubting, every time, if what told may represent the truth or not.
The serraglio's scenario is depicted with the Orientalism of 1001 Arabian nights; the days are slow and sultry, the nights are freezing outside, on fire within the palace's rooms, the ruler Madame is the frigid last survivor of a Russian dynasty, European aristocracy courtiers parade in a spectacle of crinolines, wigs, masks, in a triumph of ridicule ambitions, favoritisms and transvestism, flamboyant distractions concealing the tired virility of the libertine and the dishonor for the exile.
They slightly differ from some of the Divine Marquis' naughty crews in the "use" of children; while De Sade obscenely raped and killed children without too much consideration apart from their virginity, Philippe Jullian narrated of a court were children were abducted and sexualised (of course), they were even bought and sold (even worse), although they were the celebrated and adored personification of the collective court nostalgia of Youth, little gods and goddesses of Beauty, whose plump and agile bodies mixed with a hint of seductive childish naughtiness were the sole prerequisite to access power and protection from the honorable high members of the court; this representation made me remember a quote from "The Picture of Dorian Gray":
"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having."
Monsieur, the court baboon, is a paradoxical character who, in its bestiality, seems to be the sole courtier with some decorum left.
The Scandinavian young courtier clearly perceived the hypocrisies of the court, embellished exile of promised endless pleasures hiding a darker shadow possessing the deep unconscious of the courtiers, a "spleen” made of profound boredom, melancholy, dissatisfaction, oblivion, tragic awareness of a meaningless existence.
As a reader, I quite enjoyed how Jullian quietly educated me in perceiving this spleen tormenting the courtiers and how their shadow is physically represented by the Other Side, land of the unknown were the exiled courtiers, the ones who asked "too many questions", were sent.
The beggar concludes his story with a description of the Other Side, court's shadow now explicitly illustrated, a dusty realm of crudest realism, human horrors, stench, maladies where the zombie-like inhabitants trade the worn-out precious fabrics for medicines.
The "shadow people" crawled silently until the entrance of the once beloved court; the court has been taken with brutality, victory celebrated with a dionysiac soundtrack made of primitive percussion and contortion barbaric dances.
The court decadence's is celebrated with the latest toast of pure alcohol, last remaining beverage following the cut of water pipes caused by the upcoming Egyptian invaders.
The finale is an inferno of flames and assassinations: the bling beggar concludes his narration with:
"In a flash of light I saw the great shadow of Madame tottering in the flames, a parrot that flew off uttering a piercing shriek, blue and pink dresses stained with blood, the Grand-Maitresse with her hair on fire, then nothing more except a blaze of blood in both eyes."
My fascination with Jullian lies with his persona, the dandy-aesthete, his elegant erudition, his taste incredibly similar to mine (in topics, aesthetics and, allegedly, Moroccan men).
Flight from Egypt was my first fiction book of Philippe Jullian; it has been for me the most exquisite decadent escape in these terribly boring times.
My only note would be on the register: I would define it too "dry" for what should be a luscious succulent narrative although, who am I to criticise Jullian, author of landmark art history catalogues and biographies; I am pretty sure Flight from Egypt linguistic register has been heavily influenced by the genres that Jullian indeed mastered.
Each encounter is furtive, either hidden in streets' corners, tombs, hammam, each story is told in exchange for a monetary contribution, which leaves the reader doubting, every time, if what told may represent the truth or not.
The serraglio's scenario is depicted with the Orientalism of 1001 Arabian nights; the days are slow and sultry, the nights are freezing outside, on fire within the palace's rooms, the ruler Madame is the frigid last survivor of a Russian dynasty, European aristocracy courtiers parade in a spectacle of crinolines, wigs, masks, in a triumph of ridicule ambitions, favoritisms and transvestism, flamboyant distractions concealing the tired virility of the libertine and the dishonor for the exile.
They slightly differ from some of the Divine Marquis' naughty crews in the "use" of children; while De Sade obscenely raped and killed children without too much consideration apart from their virginity, Philippe Jullian narrated of a court were children were abducted and sexualised (of course), they were even bought and sold (even worse), although they were the celebrated and adored personification of the collective court nostalgia of Youth, little gods and goddesses of Beauty, whose plump and agile bodies mixed with a hint of seductive childish naughtiness were the sole prerequisite to access power and protection from the honorable high members of the court; this representation made me remember a quote from "The Picture of Dorian Gray":
"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having."
Monsieur, the court baboon, is a paradoxical character who, in its bestiality, seems to be the sole courtier with some decorum left.
The Scandinavian young courtier clearly perceived the hypocrisies of the court, embellished exile of promised endless pleasures hiding a darker shadow possessing the deep unconscious of the courtiers, a "spleen” made of profound boredom, melancholy, dissatisfaction, oblivion, tragic awareness of a meaningless existence.
As a reader, I quite enjoyed how Jullian quietly educated me in perceiving this spleen tormenting the courtiers and how their shadow is physically represented by the Other Side, land of the unknown were the exiled courtiers, the ones who asked "too many questions", were sent.
The beggar concludes his story with a description of the Other Side, court's shadow now explicitly illustrated, a dusty realm of crudest realism, human horrors, stench, maladies where the zombie-like inhabitants trade the worn-out precious fabrics for medicines.
The "shadow people" crawled silently until the entrance of the once beloved court; the court has been taken with brutality, victory celebrated with a dionysiac soundtrack made of primitive percussion and contortion barbaric dances.
The court decadence's is celebrated with the latest toast of pure alcohol, last remaining beverage following the cut of water pipes caused by the upcoming Egyptian invaders.
The finale is an inferno of flames and assassinations: the bling beggar concludes his narration with:
"In a flash of light I saw the great shadow of Madame tottering in the flames, a parrot that flew off uttering a piercing shriek, blue and pink dresses stained with blood, the Grand-Maitresse with her hair on fire, then nothing more except a blaze of blood in both eyes."
My fascination with Jullian lies with his persona, the dandy-aesthete, his elegant erudition, his taste incredibly similar to mine (in topics, aesthetics and, allegedly, Moroccan men).
Flight from Egypt was my first fiction book of Philippe Jullian; it has been for me the most exquisite decadent escape in these terribly boring times.
My only note would be on the register: I would define it too "dry" for what should be a luscious succulent narrative although, who am I to criticise Jullian, author of landmark art history catalogues and biographies; I am pretty sure Flight from Egypt linguistic register has been heavily influenced by the genres that Jullian indeed mastered.
February 25, 2008
A very surreal Egyptian version of a 1001 Arabian nights where a wandering tramp tells stories of his past in Egypt to a tourist. Sometimes hard to follow and very surreal story with slight erotic overtones and licentiousness at an Egyptian court.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews