Customer Reviews

Maldoror and Poems (Penguin Classics)

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3 star:		(1)
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Although MALDOROR's most immediate pleasure is its naked nastiness - rape, murder, torture, paedophilia, bestiality, blasphemy etc. - the truly unsettling nature of the book is its textual instability, the violence of its language, the horrible, concrete, surgical beauty of its images, the haunting effect of its descriptions, its foregrounding and destabilising of slowly compelling narrative, its clashing of tones, moods, viewpoints, narrators, targets, sympathies. French literature produces a lot of books like this, wherein a madman shouts the reader out of his complacency (e.g. Rimbaud, Corbiere, the Gide of FRUITS OF THE EARTH). This is better than most because its disgust is funny and a thrill. After book three, though, it all becomes a little wearing and monotonous, as Lautreamont's assault is more tediously preoccupied with language. The same fault can be levelled at the underrated, protean, difficult POEMS, where intellectual engagement wins out over sensual overspill. Book Six of MALDOROR, though, is a masterpiece of narrative subversion, simultaneously asserting the power of stories and running riot through their conventions, looking forward to, amongst others, Borges and Nabokov. Knight's introduction is rewarding, if a little dated, but the translation is one of the best I've ever read, capturing Maldoror's rhythmic logorrhea to horrible perfection.

If reading a normal horror novel (a term which I really dislike) is like watching a car crash, this evil, sick, tasteless and brilliant book is like being in one. Sensitive types should be warned that it contains lashings of blasphemy, weird sex (including, in one eye-popping instance, sex with a shark), bloody murder and rape, and all manner of thoroughly awful things. At which point I suspect you've all fallen asleep. Don't. What separates this from the supposed 'shock' lit of, say, Irvine Welsh, is a delirious sense of invention. More in tune with Michael Moore or Chris Morris than Howard Stern, each revolted gasp from the reader is carefully placed and planned to provoke a deep-seated feeling of terror. What always needles me is the way that the book's Satanic protagonist Maldoror often switches places with the narrator. It's a full-frontal assault on the reader's security. And why do we read it? Because it makes every other supposedly shocking novel seem tame, unadventurous and laboured. Even American Psycho. Especially American Psycho. Rather than a plot, Lautreamont has chosen a selection of essays and incidents to show Maldoror's evil. His concern over whether or not to kill a child is one of the many freakish and distressing incidents ("...lest your body burst like an over-ripe fruit"), but it is all shot through with black humour and a surprisingly moral indignation. In fact, Lautreamont offered to 'tone it down' for its first publication. Thank God he didn't. "You have no idea how hard it is", as Maldoror would say.

What to say about Maldoror that hasn't been said yet? What to say about the mysterious son of a diplomat who appeared in France, wrote this book and died, vanishing from the world, yet leaving his mark for decades and centuries yet to come?
The first time I had the pleasure of reading this exceptional work, I was taken aback. Barely seventeen, I hungrily swallowed the disturbing images leaping at me from the pages, not to fully comprehend them until years later. This work, over a century old, is believed to be the first work, the foundation stone of the surrealist movement, a movement that penetrated into every aspect of art, life, being; whether we are willing to admit it or not, this work is as important today as it was when originally published in 1868 (well, at least a part of it was). The world was not ready to receive the complete self-awarness of evil Maldoror so fully comprehends, and the world is still not ready. This work is certainly not to be read by a "closed" mind. It is said that to be creative, one must borderline insanity, yet, Lautreamont was playing with genius; a genius of a caliber capable of scaring away even the most immodest of us. But get deeper into his work, walk past the disturbed images, surpass your fears and you shall see the light. This work cannot be ignored, cannot be left to collect dust. I have owned several copies over the past 14 years, and I am still finding new meanings, new passages and new understanding in this wonderful work. This trully is the one book that will never get old, that will always keep on giving, as long as one is ready to listen.

The Comte de Lautremont's (1846-70) amazingly wierd, blasphemous, quasi-"stream of consciousness"-style, surrealistic, fantastic prose-poem, "Maldoror", has been quite appropriately described as "half vision, half-nightmare -- of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children." Indeed, this "astonishing" writing is starkly and unapologetically larded with unmitigated violence, chthonic bloodshed, and primal savagery -- "delirious, erotic,...grandiose by turns" -- revoltingly macabre, obsessive (like much of Sade), bitterly and maliciously satirical, misanthropic, mind numbingly hallucinatory (like a menacing pedal point or sinister sympatheitic drone), and much focused on destruction and ruin. Be advised, prospective reader, that this is not stuff for delicate sentiments or Wal-Mart "smiley faces". However, if you are moved by the dark, Southern Gothic works of Edgar Allen Poe, you may get caught up in Ducasse's "roman noir"

Originally entitled "Chants de Maldoror" and first published in 1868, this work -- penned by a Frenchman named Isidore Ducasse who was born in Montevideo and who died in Paris -- was acclaimed by the early surrealists (e.g.- Jarry, Modigliani, Verlaine, Gide, Breton, et. al.) and elite "fashionistas" of the turn-of-the-century "avant-garde" as a spiritually formative work of genius, apparently due to its pronounced and darkly sadistic, extremist wordsmithery, coupled with an utterly debauched abandonment to fantasy and dreams, and its unwavering adherence to the amoral mantra, "art for art's sake". Also, the author's mysterious life, about which little definitive is known other than that he was foreign-born and died quite young (always seemingly appropriate in artistic lore and consumptive mythology), no doubt resonated a certain "cache".

It's a minor miracle that Ducasse was even able to find someone willing to print and distribute his material, especially in 1868! At the time, apparently in an effort to calm and reassure his anxious, shakey publisher, Ducasse sent a letter which, in part, read, "I have written of evil, as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire, etc. have all done."

Included in this Penguin Classics edition are also Ducasse's strange, aphoristic poems, perhaps best described as frequently contradictory and paradoxical quasi-maxims (by the way, a very popular literary form when he was working). While these have certain dark beauties and memorable moments, they are largely derivative, involving reworked, rephrased borrowings and gleanings from Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and others.

In any case, Lautremont's (Ducassee's) ouput will unsettle even the most jaded of modern readers -- an amazing thing, considering this work dates from the 1860s!

Written under the pseudonym ''Comte de Lautreamont'' by South-American born Frenchman Isidore Ducasse in the mid-nineteenth century, ''Les Chants de Maldoror'' (''Songs of Maldoror'') is without doubt one of the darkest, most bizzare, most morbidly misanthropic works of literature ever penned.
Considered by many to be the first (and possibly still the finest) example of Surrealist writing, ''Maldoror'', as well as it's shadowy author (about whom virtually nothing is known, aside from the above-stated facts) exerted a tremendous influence on succeeding generations of artists, from Paul Verlaine and Andre Gide to Breton and Modigliani.
Does the book deserve it's reputation as a surreal masterpiece? Certainly reading it is an unpleasant, unsettling, hallucinatory experience. There is no central plot, apart from the theme of the villanous titular character whose existence is an ongoing strugle with God and morality; and the lack of any clear narrative outline, as well as the uncertain sanity and morality of the author, produces on the reader a most startling and chilling effect. In a word, YES. Hell yes.
Yet it was precisely this sense of complacency which the author intended to undermine: for, at a time when the most popular schools of writing were Realism and Romanticism, the most widely read authors the likes of Hugo, Dickens, and Scott, an obscure and ingenious young Frenchman was fastidiously gnawing away at the seams of literature, crafting a strange and sinister dream-world with an insidious nightmarish quality all it's own.
''Maldoror'' is, at best, a fascinating blend of poetic language and spectacularly creepy, delirious imagery, though much of it's perverse violence and notoriously blasphemous ideology (i.e good and evil are concepts are concepts which can go hand in hand, God is a deranged and simpering pederast) may be difficult to swallow, even for the most open-minded of individuals. As Lautreamont himself states from the beginning, ''Only a few will be capable of savoring this bitter fruit with impugnity''.

(demonic chuckle)

Many of the reviewers on this site wrote spot-on commentary of the book. It seems, at its core, Maldoror is a misanthropic treatise that curses and maligns humanity, depicting innumerable "sins" and sufferings. The narrative switches from third-person to that of the anti-hero, Maldoror, on alarming occasions. It is unsettling to note how often Lautreamont's masterpiece scorns mankind and God, especially just how often we might sympathize with him. I don't know how unprecedented this style of writing was when he wrote it (not informed enough), but I know that this book is a disoriented, hallucinatory trip. Maldoror is an existential book that compels the reader to check his/her morals and attitude toward humanity. It's immediately a nihilistic book, but maybe you'll notice an ethical undercurrent more than anything else. Awesome, strange book; Like nothing else I've read.

The work that led me to a kinship with a soul,a flurry of words that gave a concreteness of voice to my seemingly endless void,the inspiration to make me pick up a pen & create somehting new.Realize people,how much anger & hatred can be generated towards everything that is beloved & endeared by mankind,through its fault or none at all.Frightening.The highly elevated poetry that exalts almost everything universal except God & Man strangles the Lit. virgins neck by its disfiguring prose fumingly expungated by perhaps the most evil character in all of lit.Witness the rape & butcher of the young girl by Maldoror & his dog.The fact that this masterpiece elevated Lautreamont to immortality & may have caused his death is enough reason for you to dare.

This is my favourite translation (and I own several) of Ducasse's famous, highly influential work. The prose is lucid and poetic and flows evenly. A very good example of Romanticism tweaked and taken to the nth degree. Historic bible of misanthropes, misfits and today's darky gothy kid types. Typical arthouse fare. A must read for those who desire to become literate in the Modernist classics. The 'Natural Born Killers' of the Symbolist Poets. A work to savour, enjoy, and then throw in the trashbin. Or to let collect dust on the bookshelf, placed cover down, lest the reader be reminded of his exquisite culpability in sharing vicarious pleasure in Mal's anti-social exploits.

An incredible piece of early surrealistic French literature that perhaps transcends this realm. When reading it, one writhes from disgust while nearing ecstasy, and crawls into the depths of human insanity with a chilling enjoyment. "If I exist, I am not another."

One of the classics of macabre literature--but just to note, this is not the Lykiard translation. That one is better if you can find it.