Isidore - Softcover

Isidore Ducasse, better known by his literary moniker, the Comte de Lautreamont, left only one significant work, Les Chants de Maldoror , but that convulsive experimental novel gained him permanent entrance to the modernist pantheon. Otherwise, we know almost nothing of this Surrealist prodigy, who died in 1871 at the age of 23, having destroyed all his personal papers. In this fictionalized biography, English poet Reed has embellished the scant traces of Ducasse's life--his childhood in Paraguay, his membership in the Parisian netherworld--into a hallucinatory replica of the decadent imagination in full fever. Well received on its publication in England, Isidore extends the genre of self-conscious literature we associate with Anthony Burgess and Julian Barnes, among English authors. Poetry lovers will be taken with Reed's lush prose and musky psychological perfumes; diehard bohemians will sway dreamily to its strains of Baudelaire and Poe. A clever and unsettling performance.
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Reed is a poet of rich and subversive imagery. In identifying himself with Lautreamont, he succeeds in an uncanny impersonation of the style of that morbid youth. -- The Times

Superb - Jeremy Reed convincingly becomes Isidore Ducasse in this brilliant and exotic re-creation of the world of The Songs of Maldoror...this extraordinary and poetic text. Enthralling and entertaining from first to last. -- J G Ballard