Nate D's Reviews > Les Chants de Maldoror

I wish that the mourning reader may at least be able to say to himself: "One must give him his due. He has greatly stupefied me. What might he not have done had he lived longer!

Dead, in fact, at 24, after having sufficiently stupefied readers of the late 1860s to have ensured his own obscurity, the Uruguayan-born Isidore Ducasse was resurrected by the Decadents, then the Surrealists, who found rare vision in his bizarre vignettes railing against god and mankind with a unique faculty for irrational analogy, black humored vitriol, and self-reflexive asides. (Of the latter: at one point, he agrees to go on with his story seeing that, despite his fears, he had not died during the exceedingly long preceding sentence. At another, he spends a solid two pages discussing how he will fail to say anything, first through the mechanics of closing one's lips tightly, then through a tangle of parodic philosophizing). At times a bit of a pure provocation, a puerile punk-goth gesture in the 19th-century mode, tempered with Baudelairian verbosity, but honestly those that held this up later were right to despite how (intentionally?) irritating it may be. There's just nothing else like it.

First of all I shall blow my nose, because I need to. And then, potently assisted by my hand, I shall again take up the pen holder that my fingers had let fall.