Pitched as an 'updated' version of The Three Musketeers, though, it's hard to see the line drawn once it fully starts going.

Voldemar Lestienne’s Furioso is a world full of soldiers, gas chambers, mystery women, bath-water, broken bottles, sexual humiliation, bureaucratic violence and a kind of manic theatricality that makes the whole thing feel as if fascism has been rewritten as a feverish domestic opera.

The prose moves quickly and oddly, with absurd set-pieces sliding into brutality before anyone has time to behave sensibly. There is something of the postwar European grotesque here: history not as solemn lesson, but as contamination, slapstick, erotic panic, bad faith and costume.

Not a polite novel, and probably not a book for someone looking for tidy moral architecture. More for the reader who likes their fiction rancid, sharp, unstable and wearing evening gloves while setting fire to the curtains.

W. H. Allen English translation, 1972; originally published by Librairie Arthème Fayard in 1971. Printed boards, dust jacket present. Light rubbing and edge wear to boards, pages lightly toned, clean readable copy.