Customer Reviews

Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll Pataphysician

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Faustroll is a Hallucinogenic cross between Lewis Carroll & Jules Verne. Magnificently dense style of a prose poem, images as strange as Lautremont's. It also reminded me of Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman, the only book that has done that.

Pardon that Narcissus' who wrote my Review Title...

This is a fantastic book!

I bought it here from amazon.com a number of years ago, 97 or 98 and I finally read it this past week. I don't want to give anything away, because it is so utterly unique and enjoyable....However, I will say: Track down this book! Demand it!

If you are a lover of the works or just plain amazing style of one of the 20th century's greatest literary artists... William Burroughs(!), then you will LOVE THIS BOOK! Heck, You'll ADORE it.

This is a trip by boat, on land... an adventure far more exciting than the Odyssey, but perhaps among similiar lines...

A journey from a middle point in life, to the extents of certain existences... and, to death... and beyond.. Finally, you will see why it started in the middle of life!

The climax is amazing, and every scene comes across like the greatest film never made.

Dali was definately influenced, as a number of scenes in here look like what Dali was to later paint!

In the end though I found myself saying only,

"Ha, ha."

And I did not lose myself in further considerations.

Except that, I would like to close by saying something I found very important, and dare I say, Life Changing:

...with your host Alfred Jarry. The text is astonishing and Roger Shattuck's (author of the incredible "The Banquet Years", which is partially about Jarry) introductory essay alone is worth the cover price.

In the words of the Butt-faced Baboon, "Ha Ha!"

This is a very great book, but I could hardly recommend it. Would you enjoy it? I think it is skies above the Ubu books in its range of vision, and I certainly didn't see any baboons with gluteal musculature grafted to their cheeks starring as commentator in those more famous works . . . well, I don't know what to say this "sort of thing" is exactly . . . if you are unfamiliar with this man (a drinker in the line of Rabelais, except I would say he was much more sincerely dedicated, a scholar, a scientist, a metaphysical swine, a bicycler, an eccentric above the heavyweights of French nincompoops, a novelist, -- also he did decent woodcuts, too) and his work then I would recommend the Supermale as a better beginning. If that is indeed your brand of entertainment, than hoist this flag up on the mast of your soft and sticky palm that never picked an axe to chop a block or made a fist to fight for your principles nor did anything else in all your life except to pick up another foreign book we can all be grateful for to have been translated, and sail it gently down the seas of your eyes until you land where you were looking for . . . this is a traveler's book.

This book is one of the reasons I love the old Grove Press, which first published English translations of the whacky and wonderful pataphysicians Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and the leader of the tradition itself Alfred Jarry who demolished schools of rationalist drama and built conceptual laboratories for the science of imagination. Ubo Roi takes the lead as the most mindblowing of all Jarry characters--obnoxious, ambitious, crude, vicious, and somehow delightfully engaging in his madcap adventures for more and more and more power. But one must read ALL of Alfred Jarry's books to really appreciate the boundlessness of his imagination. Dr. Faustroll is another imposing figure you'll never ever forget. This edition is superb.

Reading this book again, as I usually do on New Years Day, I started having an ether image of Doctor Faustroll, Poet and 'Pataphysician, meeting Dr. Norem, Personality Psychologist. Not to debate, but to discuss. I feel that Alfred Jarry and the good Dr. Faustroll would both understand and find etherially amusing the absurd title of her book -- the positive power of negative thinking. And they could help explain to the rest of us how psychology works. That would be nice. Or perhaps we need 'Patapsychology to stand above Freud's Metapsychological Papers. In any case, we need Dr. Faustroll to be perceptive.