Maus Space

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Reading an outrageous French book called The Tutu that was banned and lost for 100 years. With scarcely a chapter's breath in-between, there has been a woman suckling her pet garter snakes from her own tits; a tavern tramp devouring a maggot-riddled dead cat with ghoulish zeal; a foul sea of vomit and shit; a ménage a trois between the protagonist and a pair of sickly conjoined twins who are decorated with red rashes and weeping pustules; a woman who picks her nose, kneads the snot into fine pellets and eats them; and a young, foul-mouthed Lothario as God who takes delight in destroying humanity. Recommended.

The Tutu by Leon Genonceaux is quite possibly the vilest book I have ever read. Each character delights in the other's misfortunes, reveling in amorality, debauchery, blasphemy, cannibalism, incest, exhibitionism, infanticide and shitting. Brain, barf and booger-eating, sputum-sucking, motherfucking, skin-flaying: it's all in there. There is a lactating man. A two-headed prostitute who begets a four-headed progeny. A tree that grows people, some of them headless. The tree is watered by getting ritualistically pissed on at the roots. There is even a scene where the clergy is made decelibate and a few centimeters of an adulterer's penis is guillotined in a church brothel.
I read it mostly as novelty: this curiosity purported to be the strangest book penned in the 19th century (or indeed EVER). It did not disappoint. I voraciously devoured it much in the same spirit the protagonists ate their own vomit.
Perhaps I would have gleaned more from it had I been a French historian or Nietzschean scholar, mulling over the satirical indictment of the era's decadence and ministerial impunity.
For me, it was more of a freak show with dashes of disarmingly sincere poetry.