Putting My Foot in It

The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family -- the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback -- is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect.