Maurice Dekobra’s 1943 Shanghai Honeymoon

After mentioning Maurice Dekobra’s 1943 novel Shanghai Honeymoon (Lune de miel à Shanghaï in the original French) yesterday I feel a little more is deserved. The novel was first published in English in 1946. It wasn’t that well received by reviewers (“standard” seems the most commonly used description) despite one admitting that “Maurice Dekobra knows all the Shanghai gestures, native and foreign”, though I reckon it’s worth a read for a number of reasons. It certainly captures the moment of the Solitary Island and the desperation of those sojourners stuck in the city while also providing an excellent portrait of the varied international community and the nightclub scene – the Topaze nightclub in the book is probably based on Dekobra’s own experiences in Shanghai, and most probably in Sir Victor Sassoon’s Ciro’s nightclub. It is also a reasonably light novel that becomes progressively darker and ends in Bridge House with the barbarity of the Japanese invasion of the International Settlement. It neatly encapsulates the idea of Shanghai as a place to reinvent yourself, escape bad starts in life and troublesome pasts though perhaps overdoes this a tad. Still, it has been rather overlooked and, while it’s no Malraux, it is better than most of the contemporary portrayals of the city I’ve read (and that’s probably most of them to be honest!).

For the interested I’ve blogged previously on Dekobra’s China-related work here, here and here