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Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order Ink in the Blood for £5.99 (RRP £7.99) go to or call 03. “Hochet” is French for “rattle” this is a good rattling, as in unsettling, story. Dedalus obviously has exacting standards when it comes to short European fiction.
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The book is part of a series – Dedalus Euro Shorts – which I first came across 10 years ago with Guillaume Lecasble’s incredibly weird Lobster, and which now runs to 11 titles. This is, as far as I know, the first of Stéphanie Hochet’s works to be translated into English, but she has been publishing in French since 2001, specialising in a kind of mordantly witty gothicism – which is, of course, just the kind of thing that is going to attract this British imprint’s attention. The same could be said for the story “ Parker’s Back” by Flannery O’Connor, from where Hochet gets her epigraph, and if you read it you will be able to see a link between the two authors a sort of brooding intensity that somehow never becomes too oppressive, but verges on it.
You will not only learn about how a mind can become disordered, but also about the real, painful business of getting a tattoo. The book is honest about its mise-en-scène: the business of tattooing is not seen merely as a metaphor. And a journey into illness, too: there is some tricksy wordplay on “leukaemia” that left me wondering how on earth Mike Mitchell, the translator, managed it. There is a psychological cohesion to it that is all the more important when you are telling a story of what is, essentially, a descent into madness. This is a novella that is greater than the sum of its parts – it is, of course, about more than just tattooing.
I’ve known lots of women because I’ve seldom formed an attachment or I’ve seldom formed an attachment because I’ve known lots of women, I’m not sure which,” says the narrator. “I’ve known lots of women but I’ve seldom formed an attachment. These days, authors seem to stick to speaking for their own gender more than they used to. There is something about the way Hochet presents us with the mental processes of a rootless 45-year-old womaniser that suggests a writer of unusual ability. But a problem arises, the one problem you do not expect to have with a tattoo: it starts to disappear. Dimitri approves of the design and proceeds with it. The narrator thinks this is rather neat, pleasingly against the spirit of the times (“Who would dare write it on their Swatch these days?”) and, having thought about getting a tattoo since adolescence, goes to Dimitri, a tattooist he has been submitting designs to for some time our narrator is an artist. It is a memento mori, a reminder that we all eventually die. It means “They all wound the last one kills”, referring to “hours”. The phrase, he has learned, comes from sundials, and is a rather less cheery version of the more usual “ horas non numero nisi serenas (I only count sunny hours)”. The striking thing about these reflections is that they come some time after the narrator has finally, at the age of 45, got a tattoo of his own: the words “ vulnerant omnes, ultima necat”, in the form of a cross inked on to his solar plexus – one of the most painful places on the body to have one done, he has been told. People are never short of imagination when it comes to being vulgar, it’s an area where they are very creative.” And worst of all is the range of this vulgar fashion.
Blood in blood out tattoos skin#
How long will we have to put up with seeing hideous designs on innocent human skin that has not asked for anything. “But it will be a long time before that day arrives. ‘Soon it will be the fashion not to have a tattoo,” jokes the unnamed narrator of this book, towards its close.