Maldoror and Poems

by Lautréamont

Other authorsPaul Knight (Translator), Paul Knight (Introduction)

Paperback, 1978

Status

Available

Call number

841.8

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Classics (1978), Paperback, 288 pages

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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member jenesuispas

Maldoror, which greatly influenced the Surrealist movement when a copy was discovered on an old shelf, is full of imagery and poetic ranting, some of it completely random (a man with a pelican-head with a dung beetle for instance, or god's enormous pubic-hair) all meant to shock and affect the

reader in some way. My personal favorite section was the hermaphrodite, in which Lautreamont sketches the life of such a person as one would an angel. It brilliantly stands out amidst the chapters of monsters and Maldoror's ambivalence towards mankind.

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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini

This is poised between moustache-twirling gothic and surrealism avant la lettre. (It's the original source of Duchamp's chance encounter of the sewing machine and umbrella on operating table, and an avowed influence also on Artaud, Dalí, others). Maldoror is some kind of planeswalker who spends

his time murdering beautiful young men, having sex with sharks, and kicking the shit out of God in weird, cartoonishly vulgar ways, like he sees God coming down the street but then God realizes the street is a giant snake that Maldoror left there in wait for him and the snake squeezes God until his eyes burst and then Maldoror has sex with his butt till he screams. No, okay, it's really not all butts, but in the anarchic mojo here, I'm still gonna revise and say this is poised between moustache-twirling gothic, surrealism avant la lettre, and Chuck Tingle, author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt. It's the Tingle spirit applied to a Satanic antihero with a heaping dose of bright lucid nightmares for fuel. It's one of the most incredible things I've read, and I don't esteem it more only because of the deep expanse of its viciousness--a lot of this is just torture porn, and I seem to have little tolerance for that kind of stuff these days no matter how pretty and pink the flayed quivering flesh is.

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