Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Maldoror ; and, Poems (original 1869; edition 1978)by comte de Lautréamont, Lautréamont, Paul Knight
Work InformationMaldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont (1869)
Best Gothic Fiction (92) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I did not like it as much as I thought I would. It has been a highlight among surrealists and I am all for surrealism, but this book was almost agony to get through. It is extremely well written and extraordinarily imaginative although there are parts of it that are deeply perverted. ( ) This is poised between moustache-twirling gothic and surrealism avant la lettre. (It's the original source of Duchamp's chance encounter of the sewing machine and umbrella on operating table, and an avowed influence also on Artaud, Dalí, others). Maldoror is some kind of planeswalker who spends his time murdering beautiful young men, having sex with sharks, and kicking the shit out of God in weird, cartoonishly vulgar ways, like he sees God coming down the street but then God realizes the street is a giant snake that Maldoror left there in wait for him and the snake squeezes God until his eyes burst and then Maldoror has sex with his butt till he screams. No, okay, it's really not all butts, but in the anarchic mojo here, I'm still gonna revise and say this is poised between moustache-twirling gothic, surrealism avant la lettre, and Chuck Tingle, author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt. It's the Tingle spirit applied to a Satanic antihero with a heaping dose of bright lucid nightmares for fuel. It's one of the most incredible things I've read, and I don't esteem it more only because of the deep expanse of its viciousness--a lot of this is just torture porn, and I seem to have little tolerance for that kind of stuff these days no matter how pretty and pink the flayed quivering flesh is. Maldoror, which greatly influenced the Surrealist movement when a copy was discovered on an old shelf, is full of imagery and poetic ranting, some of it completely random (a man with a pelican-head with a dung beetle for instance, or god's enormous pubic-hair) all meant to shock and affect the reader in some way. My personal favorite section was the hermaphrodite, in which Lautreamont sketches the life of such a person as one would an angel. It brilliantly stands out amidst the chapters of monsters and Maldoror's ambivalence towards mankind. no reviews | add a review
Contains
Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andre Gide and Andre Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)841.8Literature French French poetry Later 19th century, 1848–1900LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |