A Barbarian in Asia (Paperback)

by Henri Michaux (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia. surreal and ironic impressions about Asia.

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (September 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811209911
• ISBN-13: 978-0811209915
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #620,743 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An european look at asia, August 30, 2003

By	David Chatenay (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Henri Michaux was travelling by himself in Asia in the 30's when he wrote his first book. Without knowing the language, the culture, the way of life, he tried to describe what he was looking at, the very first impressions he was having, before consience altered his vision. He had a very sharp "eye" for the countries he was living in, the people he was meeting, the stories he read. His perception is very european, but his curiosity for Asia, the "snapshots", images, comparisons, the knowledge he found there makes it a great read.

5.0 out of 5 stars Surreal and wise, March 4, 2009

By	Joyce Akesson "Author of 'Love's Thrilling Di... (Sweden) - See all my reviews

This book, which appeared in France originally in 1933, is translated by Sylvia Beach.
If you love surrealism and descriptions of people from other cultures, you will love to read this book written by the surrealist poet travelogue writer, Henri Michaux.
The thoughts are presented in a special poetic ethnographic genre. Michaux exults in excess and takes up thousand different elements in the different cultures that he presents here. For instance, the Hindu are contemplative, idolatrous, intolerant and immovable. The Chinese are skillful, modest, delicate and precise. The Japanese are too serious. The Malayan are clean, noble and very sympathetic.

From Joyce Akesson author of Love's Thrilling Dimensions

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Conversions into otherness and co-existence across postcolonial Asia..., June 14, 2008

By	Rob Wilson (Santa Cruz and Honolulu) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For the weird surrealist poet cum travelogue writer, Henri Michaux, as "barbarian" from culture capital of surrealism and Tahitian fantasy, Paris, travel (here using the travelogue as poetic ethnographic genre) enacted and mimed a form of self abnegation, a way of abandoning habits and smug values; with the culturally coded "I" fleeing from its past into a perpetual present which is always outside itself, always other (beholding, praying to, invoking the other).

Asian peoples were for this poet traveller of altered states, "the last resistants" to western monotony; everywhere in A Barbarian In Asia Michaux exults in excess, difference, makes poetic propaganda "for an endless variety of civilizations" by which to counter the idea of only one (monologue). His 'orientalism' is made explicit, ironic, and exaggerated enough to become what I would call, tonally, "mock orientalism," such as claiming that political domination is hard "even for an Asiatic."

Particular national or local cultures comprise for Michaux a hybrid personality "of a thousand different elements"; each culture in Asia provides a kind of sensuous style and confronts the barbaric outsider as a landscape not of humanistic sameness but of utter estrangement and a halting of predictable codes. Going beyond Marxist analysis and Christian pieties, Michaux contends that a miner's strike should be supplemented, and is, by "a miner's civilization."

Michaux journeys into cultural co existence: "To avoid war construct peace." That is, to avoid the monologue of imperialism, both political and cultural, construct estranging dialogues and multiple styles, interrogations of oriental and occidental, so called civilized and so called barbaric. Rather than a conversion experience into the commodity form there should be a conversion through voicing otherness, outsidedness