[padlabtard]

I was intending on reviewing Guillaume Lecasble's Lobster for my blog when I read it a couple of months back, but didn't feel I had the energy for it, or for a number of books I read around that time. I do think it's worth mentioning the book, however, as it's probably one of the more bizarre reads I've made my way through this year.

It's a French book, and I don't just mean that it was written in French, but it's so strange, serious yet cartoonish, that you couldn't imagine it coming from anywhere else but France - like the movie Delicatessen.

Lobster, our titular character, is a lobster. So far so easy. One day while out swimming he and his family are caught and taken aboard the Titanic. From the aquarium he witnesses the death of his parents as they are boiled alive, turning from blue to the more familiar lobster red. Bizarrely, he finds himself attracted to the women who eats his father. Then, just as Lobster is about to be boiled himself, the doomed ship hits the iceberg, the pot falls off the stove, and Lobster scurries to safety. In a liferaft he shares an intimate moment with the woman who ate his father, and just as love is about to blossom, they are cruelly separated. (All this in the first few pages.)

The book follows the endeavours of both to find each other and there's one scene in there that, were the book better known, would be infamous.

Apart from it's strange goings on, the novel itself didn't leave much of an impression on me. But it's thank to Dedalus, with their remit of bringing us a more dark fantastic slice of Europe, that I was able to read it in the first place.