From Publishers Weekly
French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) stopped writing at the age of 19. To his admirers, the anti-bourgeois rebel's last years of silent wandering are something of an embarrassment. The poet-in-revolt became a merchant in Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) and, by some accounts, a gunrunner. Borer, a French Rimbaud specialist, retraced the poet's travels in Africa and Arabia on foot, by boat and by plane. His attempt to rescue the reputation of the later Rimbaud is frequently portentous. We are told that the fugitive poet lived "a luminous madness," that he saw the world as "pure immanence," and that in his literary silence he was preparing "for Nothingness or God." Written in a free-floating, elevated style that mimics the heightened consciousness of Rimbaud's verse, this serendipitous adventure delivers little jolts of insight but no great revelations.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In 1879, the 25-year-old French poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned art and Europe, moving to Africa. To explore the silence of this period, Borer combines biography, literary analysis, and travelog, retracing Rimbaud's movements through Ethiopia and Egypt, trying to evoke the place, and searching for traces of the poet. Guided by Rimbaud's letters and glancing back at his poetry, especially Illuminations and A Season in Hell , Borer finds a coherence between the two halves of Rimbaud's life, an existence defined and unified by the act of searching. While often interesting and occasionally suggestive, this study of Rimbaud's silence offers little new to our appreciation of the poet or his work.
-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
