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DARK HORSEY SAYS- Unintentionally but totally avant-garde & 'experimental'- Roussel is one of the modern era's strangest authors & this perhaps his strangest work. This edition is boxed & beautiful, with the illustrations still 'uncut' as they were in the originals. (In a move the prefigured Ducahmp & the Surrealists' strategies Roussel comissioned an illusrator to illustrate the poem on the basis only of short descriptions of the episode to be illustrated. The illustrattions were then taken as given & interpolated into the text to which they stand in an oddly liberating & askew angle.) A distant, wealthy & very eccentric cousin of Marcel Proust, Roussel 's influence has grown since the spectacular & scandalous failure of his various plays (attended & cheered by the Surrealists - whom he himself never understood) & the failure of his novels & poems to sell past double figures. Roussel is a patron saint of the Surrealist movement & of the Ou Li Po & a major influence on major writers - such as Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec. A work of fiction, Roussel believed, should be"a pure product of the imagination". Jules Verne was Roussel's own chosen master, but Roussel's methods add extraordinary complexity to the feel of his work & to our experience of them.Roussel came to Melbourne but, as was usual on both his world trips, he hardly left his hotel room. Typically, he liked the idea of a tram trip being able to get him to either Mentone or Scarborough in just a half hour or so (separated as they were in the Old World by the English channel). Roussel was in part looking for a cure for baldness. He invented his own mobile home. He never wore shirts more than twice & always looked a picture. Intrigued? |
