New York: Padell Book Company, 1953

8vo, pp. 462. Original grey boards, letterd in blue on spine. A fine copy in a very good pictorial dustwrapper, with discoloration to bottom edge of rear panel and scuffing to head of spine affecting adjacent top edge of front panel.

First edition of the author's only book, '[a] grand novel on the conflict between normal and abnormal passions', according to the blurb.
Wilma Prezzi was an artist and fashion designer. She wasn't a novelist. I'll go further: she couldn't string a sentence together. Here's a sample of her style, taken from her author's note :

'I have not intended an ambitious exaggeration of gross abuses here, depicted for the sole purpose of concentrating on those anomalous adventures that shock and dismay. I have attempted to reduce the evocation of episode after episode to the existing raw materials that produce shame.
If the artist is to use the written word rather than the brush to serve the disintegrated society of today, a society in which a phase of sex once considered unmentionable is currently flaunted with anarchic inconsistency, even to the point of sham marriage, then he must make his cruel exposition clear. I have endeavoured to do this.'

The book, set among aristocratic Hungarian homosexuals living in the Paris of the 1930s, is even worse than the author's note. Perhaps it's unfair to judge a 462-page book from its first two paragraphs, but it appears to be a translation from Hungarian. By someone who doesn't speak Hungarian. Its publisher, the Padell Book Company, hit their literary high point when they published the early work of Kenneth Patchen in the 1940s; by the time Dark Desires was published the novel was sharing a list with such classics as Lightning Ju-Jitsu, Sex Practices of Prisoners and Hygiene of the Breast. An understandably unread copy, with slight wear to the head of the dustwrapper's spine. Good luck.

Keywords: Wilma. Maria. Prezzi