How I Wrote Certain Of My Books [Paperback]

Raymond Roussel (Author), John Ashbery (Author), Trevor Winkfield (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2005

The first anthology of writings by Roussel, a legendary eccentric who influenced artists as diverse as Duchamp and Gide; contains selections from most of his major works.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Considered to be the precursor to literary surrealism, Roussel was admired as a genius by such illustrious contemporary French writers as Cocteau, Gide, Foucault, and Giacometti. To the public in general he was perhaps one of the most extraordinary, eccentric writers of this century. In this volume, a cross-section of his major writings, he explains the method he used to compose his works. When he sent parts of this book to the printer in 1932, the understanding was that the text would not be published while he was alive (he died in 1933; it came out two years later). And so it was his last and posthumous work. Roussel's style is largely based on linguistic riddles and compositions of phonetically enigmatic or distorted sentences and phrases. His masterpiece, "New Impressions from Africa," is a poem illustrating his verbal acrobatics and the use of seemingly endlessly intertwined parenthetical thoughts like a Chinese puzzle. All this is compounded with a curious collection of 59 illustrations commissioned by the author and inspired by him. Recommended for literary collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Exact Change; Revised edition (August 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878972146
• ISBN-13: 978-1878972149
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #623,924 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This is a good introduction to an obscure French writer., August 10, 1998

By 

William Gillespie ([e-mail]) (Urbana, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How I Wrote Certain Of My Books (Paperback)

Raymond Roussel was an eccentric French writer who was born in 1877 and apparently committed suicide in 1933. His best known works of those translated into English are his novels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa. Roussel wrote novels, tried to adapt them to the stage, and then tried to write a play for the stage. The audience responded to the play by throwing things and yelling at each other. Roussel, who never experienced anything like widespread acclaim, has nonetheless influenced French literature. Eventually, he was to gain the support of the surrealists. Decades after his death, he is remembered fondly by the OuLiPo - a group of Paris-based writers devoted to exploring new experimental literary forms. Two American poets - John Ashbery and Harry Mathews (also a member of the OuLiPo) - hold him in high esteem and here the two of them offer new translations of some of Roussel's works. How I Wrote Certain of my Books is the title of this collection and also the title of an essay by Roussel to explain how he wrote the two novels I mentioned. The rest of the collection includes an excellent introduction and biography of Roussel by John Ashbery, the first chapter of each of the two novels, the fifth act of one of Roussel's plays, the third canto of his poem "New Impressions of Africa," and the notes to serve as an outline for another novel Roussel apparently never wrote. Roussel's novels are among what I consider the great untranslatable works of the twentieth century. Much of the imagery and plot detail are bizarre flowerings of imaginative detail rooted in French puns. When this is translated, one gets only the strange details, but none of the phonetic basis underlying them. Like a joke that isn't funny, or a sonnet which has been paraphrased so that it no longer rhymes. The canto of the poem "New Impressions of Africa" was my favorite part of the collection. I've never read a poem with nested parentheses and lengthy footnotes before. The translation preserves aspects of the rhyme and meter, even throughout the footnotes. Although this volume doesn't contain the entire poem, it does contain all of the 59 drawings that originally accompanied it. But these drawings are not only not by Roussel, they aren't even interesting. In an introduction, which explains how Roussel had sent 59 captions to a hack artist to make mundane sketches to compliment his bizarre poem, Salvador Dali is quoted as saying that, seen in the context of the poem, the drawings "shed their banality and become metaphysical." Fine, but here the drawings are not only not shown in the context of the poem, the entire poem isn't even presented. I can save you some time by telling you right now that the drawings numbered 40-48 accompany the poem on pages 97-103. Read How I Wrote Certain of my Books as an introduction to one of France's literary madmen, and for an exceedingly clear description of how Raymond Roussel wrote certain of his books. To anyone who is curious for a taste, but not a full course, of Roussel's writing, this volume will serve well. Should you be utterly taken by the writing, however, you may be dismayed that few of the works are represented in their entirety. You will never get to find out how the novels end or how the play begins. At its best, How I Wrote Certain of My Books will send to your library looking for more.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars INVALUABLE for translation of "Documents to Serve as Outline", November 15, 2007

By 

Dan Mash - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How I Wrote Certain Of My Books (Paperback)

5 stars, but only as a companion piece or annotated SAMPLE-PLATE. It's pretty easy to get confused about what this book really is, so here goes:

1) This book is a big grab-bag of Roussel material. It contains long excerpts from his two big novels, and from his poetry, and so on. There's plenty of annotations.

2) It also includes Roussel's essay about his method, wherein he describes how he composed some of his books. That essay is called "How I Wrote Certain of My Books", and the publisher misleadingly chose that as the name of this whole book.

3) But it goes beyond being a mere sampler, because some of the pieces have never before appeared in English. Especially the best piece, "Documents to Serve as an Outline", which is fully narrated over 80 pages, and is NOT an outline at all, so don't be scared.

If you want to dive in to Roussel with a full-length work, you should find Cunningham's translation of Locus Solus and read that first. It's very hard to come across unless your library has over 25 floors, which mine did.

Personally I would have paid the $15 entry price here even if the only thing included was the fantastic "Documents To Serve As An Outline." You cannot find this piece anywhere else in English, unlike the novels, and it's the best part of the "How I Wrote" package. I know the title "Documents To Serve As An Outline" doesn't sound very entertaining, but rest assured that it is fully narrated, not an outline, and that it's incredible. Apparently Roussel would have expanded it if he had lived longer.

A lot of the publicity material surrounding Roussel's work is misleading, in that it makes his style sound radical or experimental. The professional review on Amazon.com for example calls it "distorted" and "enigmatic." But years ago when I first read Roussel, he surpassed my wildest hopes and I found none of the pitfalls or turn-offs that I expected from all the hype that I'd seen.

The under-rated and over-looked part of Roussel, yet the part that unfolds off the very pages to fill up your bedroom and neighborhood, is the sheer genius of story-telling. Roussel has a dazzling ability to pull endless heroes, villains, conspirators, thieves, secret lovers, bards, misers, emperors, cultists, oracles, shamans, hermits, out of thin air and then explain to you-- richly and convincingly, yet with incredible concision-- their adventures and their tribulations and all the repercussions they have across the generations of his fictional worlds. The total effect is like looking at an unrolled tapestry or quilt that depicts countless essential scenes, each one involving some tremendous or trivial historical anecdote that is intricately linked to the historical scenes on the other patches.

These tales (found in "Documents To Serve"; and also in Locus Solus etc) have everything that archetypically great stories have, and more: love, betrayal, tyranny, forgiveness, fantastic magnanimity, loss, disgrace, lust, executions, exonerations, vindication, solitude, comedy, crime. Most of the time at the end of a section I would sit there shaking my head back and forth simply trying to digest what I'd just witnessed, in a kind of disbelief about how intense I found it.

Roussel's method will always hog all the attention, but it's the least striking part of his work. You can rest easy: Roussel is not a gimmick writer, and his books are not sequences of wordplay. He's been called "dream-like", but most authors described in that way usually cast a haze over what they write in order to achieve the effect. Roussel on the other hand gives you everything, and hides nothing. He is fully traditional with his voice and with his relationship to the reader: there are no narrative tricks whatsoever, no shifting viewpoints, no "blurring of the lines" between reality and dream, no untrustworthy narration, no nonsense.

Mark my words: a living man who had the ability to dash off characters and stories, and stories within stories, off-the-cuff, that approached what Roussel accomplishes in "Documents To Serve As An Outline" would be loved by children at family reunions, and nobody would let him alone for 2 seconds, they would need to hear more.

And throughout it all, Roussel remains one of the most concise but vivid writers I've ever read. He strives for and reaches the highest standards of clarity. Some would say eccentrically high. The efficiency and vividness of his prose has a unique power. Read it.

Roussel's fame (or notoriety) always rests on everybody's fascination with his mechanical/linguistic process that yielded the starting ingredients for his compositions, rather than what he achieved in terms of raw narration when he expanded those ingredients into a book-length work. These achievements deserve independent and special recognition but it's been overshadowed by the sensation of his method.

You can read for yourself Roussel's explanation of his method in this very volume. As he himself documents, and as you can see for yourself, the method only produces a relative handful of words and ideas which then serve as kick-starters for his imagination. In other words, Roussel used the linguistic/mechanical methods only as a treasure chest of ideas, especially to come up with peculiar props and artifacts, but then he did the usual craftsman's work of filling out his 300 page novels with visionary narrative skill. His books are never described in this way simply because his homophonic method is an easier and more spectacular thing for people to talk about.

So what's the bad news about this book? WELL: The "Documents to Serve as an Outline" only adds up to about 80 pages-- Roussel died and never finished the project. Don't be scared, though: the so-called "outlines" are not outlines at all, and are free-standing and self-sufficient stories. Nevertheless, the title implies that they're a mere skeleton of what the man ultimately envisioned. So I suppose you'd consider that a let-down if you were a stickler.

BONUSES: "How I Wrote Certain Of My Books" also has a comprehensive (and even temperamental?) bibliography, has informative end-notes, includes a mysterious set of illustrations that Roussel himself commissioned (Salvador Dali of all people has sung lavish praises for the commission), and in all honesty the book has a beautiful blue inside-cover (paperback) the likes of which I've never seen.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Monsieur Roussel Rules!...He Takes The Cake..., May 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: How I Wrote Certain Of My Books (Paperback)

It's a tragedy of Rousselian proportions that this is the only easily-acquired text of the Master in print... Roussel was, after all, the subject of Michel Foucault's very first (& to me his only readable!) book DEATH & THE LABYRINTH (a perfect companion to this collection/introduction). The present volume is essential to complete one's appreciation of the 'novels' LOCUS SOLUS & IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA, should they drop into your lucky lap...you see, I too find myself thoroughly intrigued/mesmerized/in awe of the strange achievement of this genius-nut, inspirer as well of Breton, Cocteau, Dali, Leiris, Duchamp especially, Robbe-Grillet coitainly, Perec indubitably; but these dudes don't hold a candle to the lucid lunacy, fertile-beyond-belief imagination, and quaint language perfectly suited to express the convoluted twisted-mythic enigmatic obsessions of RR... who felt the Star on his forehead while but a teen, which Star had begun to glow on high when he was found...