Maldoror and Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

by Lautréamont (Author), Paul Knight (Translator, Introduction) "ISIDORE DUCASSE, who wrote the Chants de Maldoror under the pseudonym 'Comte de Lautreamont', was born in Montevideo on 4 April 1846, the son of..." (more)
Key Phrases: female shark, three daisies, great crab, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Rue Vivienne (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andre Gide and Andre Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece.

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (November 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140443428
• ISBN-13: 978-0140443424
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #149,602 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perversely pleasurable for a while., July 3, 2000

By	darragh o'donoghue (dublin, ireland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What hit me?, October 31, 1999

By A Customer

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lautreamont's ''Maldoror'': dissections, umbrellas, & alot of twisted sh*t, June 29, 2006

By	Menachem Rephun "Billy Sluthers McShea" (Passaic, N.J) - See all my reviews

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)