I May be Old - fashioned, but— I shall be surprised if
there is not trouble over a novel called A Woman's Evil Inspiration by the Count of Torriggia, which Anglo-Italian Publications Limited propose to publish on July 6th at a price of 12s. 6d. Attracted by its old- fashioned title (its neighbour on the Literary Editor's shelves was called Mouse in Eternity, by Nedra Tyre), I took it down to see what it was about. It describes, in a dreary and pretentious style and in considerable detail, the activities of a lady of fifty-five whose only interests in life are flagellation and drugs. The narrative rambles aimlessly on through what the blurb calls " a grotesque twilight world of wealthy perverts," until at last the lady, in the course of a party which she is giving to celebrate her son's coming of age, absent- mindedly flogs a man to death in her bedroom. She and her lover decamp to Paris, where they attend a bal masque at which the practice of their favourite perversion is combined with crude blasphemies of a kind calculated to give particular offence to Roman Catholics. The publishers' description of this nauseating book as " a unique experience in the realm of fiction " is, I should say, dead accurate.
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