Hotel Lautreamont [Paperback]

John Ashbery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2000

Critics, scholars, students, and other readers of contemporary poetry have long appreciated Ashbery's uncanny mastery of the cadence and lyricism of colloquial speech, but they have been less sensitive to the equally important influences in his work of such "outsider" French poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and Isidore Ducasse (a/k/a Count de Lautréamont). These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, Hotel Lautréamont underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in New Statesman and Society, this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blandishments, chitchat, jokes, parodies, personae and all kinds of slang circulate freely through Ashbery's ( April Galleons ) latest collection. As always, his work will frustrate readers who must know just what it's about. Curious and spectacular details no sooner come up than they vanish; distractions and even boredom have their places; and Ashbery's central preoccupations--passing time, the ambiguities of identity--are as ordinary as they are enduring. The title of the volume alludes to the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont, a 19th-century French author much admired by the Surrealists. By putting the count's name to a commercial establishment for travelers--or providing him with a family seat--Ashbery leads us to consider his relation, as an American, to the traditions of French poetry. He is a past master at slipping across established boundaries of discourse, and the limit of his work is perhaps that it is so entirely urbane. Tempered by irony, his poems are mitigated by sentiment, as if their author is resigned to the fact that the conventions they send up are about as satisfactory as anything gets. Still, the poems continually surprise us with the question of what to make of them. Are they psychological evocations, linguistic abstractions, a commentary on the way we live now, confused echoes of a redeemed tongue, or simply arbitrary in their inspiration? Ashbery's art allows for all these readings--and then some.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

In Ashbery's great work, the mysterious surfaces and atmospheres of his poetry are charged with a unique power, as evasive yet as luminous as an aurora borealis, rendering his difficulties well worth the undertaking for serious readers. Unfortunately, in his first book since last year's Flow Chart ( LJ 5/1/91), Ashbery seems caught in a tedium vitae that flattens out his best effects with inconsequences, the elegiac occulted by the depressive. In this collection, too long by at least half, Ashbery alternates between launching his style in a more jarringly surrealist direction and just meandering along, "living the life/ reserved for those who have never thought things out clearly," telling us "To mope/ is human; I mope, therefore I am." There are some lovely poems here, but they are crowded out by many lesser renditions written in the manner to which their author is perhaps too accustomed. For completists.
- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 157 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374527555
• ISBN-13: 978-0374527556
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,272,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Surrealism that shatters and renews your vision, July 10, 2011

By 

A book reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hotel Lautreamont (Paperback)

Ashbery is, it may be argued, the most imaginative, creative, wonderfully empathetic, and worldly poets writing. He brings Keats' concepts of Negative Capability to bear on our experience with each other, our feelings and self consciousness, and the sneaky unconscious, that wears its mask in the darkest of places. Although many of these poems deal with themes full of darkness and deep weight, like the ocean fathoms, they are composed of moments of lightness, love, and sheer whimsy. The reader is always slightly out of place at the start or end of a poem, but it allows a kind of subtle fog to spread through the mind like faraway birds: "Where are you? Where you are is the one thing I love, / yet it always escapes me, like the leaves in their lilacs, / too busy for just one answer, one rejoinder." His visions are cemented with mortar and Elmer's glue from the dreams and lost loves that we notice in the subway of our sleep but which we must sacrifice for bread and tea. His poems rustle the dreams of our musing cities and make the metropolis of experience fall like orange trees. I can't come close to describing it. Ashbery is brilliant.
This book will shatter and repair your imagination like fog made of glass.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Yes, May 24, 2002

By 

dylanissimus "dylanissimus" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hotel Lautreamont (Paperback)

As daring as Ulysses Grant, as timorous as Tennyson, as bold as Beddoes, this imbroglio of tepid vignettes, this rebarbative hymnal of blithe spirituals, never ceases to fascinate the "hypocrite lecteur" -- until, of course, it does.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ashbery Deserves Better, February 12, 2005

By 

Driver9 (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hotel Lautreamont (Paperback)

This intriguing, surreal book of poems does not deserve the nasty treatment dished out by the (until now) sole reviewer of this book. I was appalled not just by the mean-spirited nature of the review but also by how strikingly different my impression of Hotel Lautreamont is. It is as though we read two different books. Whatever grudge the earlier reviewer is obviously harboring toward Mr. Ashbery, please do not let this pedantic vocabulary fetishist deter you from a truly rewarding experience.

PS: The uninformed slur on General Grant is worthy of a duel!