Customer Reviews

Journey to the Orient

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The reader ought be warned that this is a very small portion of the book, although I see nothing about it having been abridged. My copy in French runs to 944 pages, so any reader should know that reading this small selection will be nothing like reading the entire work.

I'm sure that it's a fairly select demographic that buys books by this guy, or has ever heard of him for that matter. He's not necessarily one of those authors that's going to win over a lot of people nowadays even if they do "rediscover" him. Oprah's not going to feature Gerard de Nerval in her little book club. He is just simply too bizarre, too occult and obscure, too "rococo" for the average reader, and I guess he always was. But for those very reasons, there are certain people who will think he's the best thing before or since sliced bread.

Evidently fond of exotic locales, customs, women, drugs, etc, it only follows that this nineteenth-century Frenchman would find himself magnetically drawn to the "Orient," to the fabled meccas of Beirut, Cairo, and of course the "font of drug-taking" itself, Constantinople, where he could liberally sample the world-renowned hashish and slave-girls without fear of reprimand from neurotic Europeans obsessed with "propriety." (Indeed his descriptions of such phenomena are just as offensive to the ultra-PC postmodernist of today as they were to his bourgeois contemporaries - and for essentially identical reasons.) He is very much the chauvinist white guy who feels entitled to indulge when among "inferiors."

The pedantic intricacy of his descriptions is surely a literary reflection of the action of the drug. "Journey to the Orient" is no ordinary travel-journal; it may be doubted whether half the events recounted ever actually transpired; but the details are consistently rendered with hallucinogenic clarity. In fact, only a few fragments of the original massive tome are included in this translation, but the entire second portion consists of a tale supposedly overheard in a Constantinopolitan coffee-and-hash house, a re-telling, with florid embellishments, of the Masonic legend of the building of Soliman's (Solomon's) Temple and the murder of the architect Adoniram (Hiram Abiff) - yet the narrative never looses the conviction of first-hand experience. I picked the following passage at random - it gives an idea of the baroque style of the book:

"Darkness suddenly falls and the sky is muffled by black specks which grow bigger as they approach; flocks of birds tumble into the temple, divide into groups, form circles, jostle together, arranging themselves finally into a sumptuous, shimmering foliage; while their wings unfold into opulent bouquets of green, scarlet, jet-black and azure."

It's easy to see why Gerard de Nerval was such an icon for Surrealists like Joseph Cornell. One can open the book to any page and find such immediately visceral passages; the context is almost unimportant. Life is a dream, a sequence of fantastic images, and the best literature can do is to embody the existential experience. If this sounds like your cup of hashish-paste, then dig in.

Please note that my rating is for this edition of the book, not the complete work itself.

Published in France in the 1850s, "Voyage En Orient" is a masterwork of 19th Century Orientalism, with the glib, dandified, and perpetually curious Gerard de Nerval making his way through Cairo and other environs of the Middle East. In its original incarnation the book runs to nearly 700 pages; the full text was translated into English in 1930 by Conrad Elphinstone and published in two volumes by Harcourt Brace as "The Women of Cairo," which was Nerval's original title for the book. Of course this Harcourt Brace edition is long, long out of print. Then in 1972 Norman Glass translated the book into English anew, and his translation at least is still in print, though unfortunately he's gutted the majority of Nerval's narrative.

Glass puts his cards on the table in his introduction, stating that modern readers wouldn't wish to read Nerval's digressive descriptions of Cairo, his trip to the Pyramids, and etc, because modern readers are already accustomed to such things via movies and TV. This is ridiculous. For who else would read Nerval's "Journey to the Orient" other than people who WANT to read his descriptions of said things? This books is as niche-market as you can get, yet Glass seems to think it would appeal to the average reader. As if he's translating the French Mark Twain or something.

But if this is the only version of Nerval's classic you can easily find in English, it will do - just understand that so much has been lost. Glass picks up the narrative well into Nerval's journey; characters such as his humorous dragoman Abdul appear en media res, with no background material - material which, of course, exists in the unexpurgated version of the story. Regardless, here you will find Nerval trying to act like the locals, buying a slave girl (a feisty Malaysian beauty), researching the Druzes, and listening to dopefueled tales of Masonic mystery. All of it enjoyable, but again, it will only serve to whet your appetite for the full book.

In short, this book is an exotic and erotic travelogue which trades on the mysteries of the Freemasons and revels in the pungent smoke of hashish. It is to be read in full, and the reader is directed to that Harcourt Brace edition, which, despite being translated nearly a century ago, still reads as fresh as Glass's more recent translation. You can always get it via Interlibrary Loan if you don't want to shell out the cash for it - copies of the book are a bit pricey on the collector's circuit.