Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is taking a group of visitors on a tour of "Locus Solus", his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), next-door neighbor of Marcel Proust, can be described without exaggeration as the most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. How I Wrote Certain of My Books is the key to his unearthly style; it is accompanied by selections from all his major works, translated by John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, and others.

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance -- starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music -- Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that Andr? Breton termed him "the greatest mesmerizer of modern times." But even more remarkable than the mind-bending events Roussel details -- as well as their outlandish, touching, or tawdry backstories -- is the principle behind the novel's genesis, a complex system of puns and double-entendres that anticipated (and helped inspire) such movements as Surrealism and Oulipo. Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of "Impressions of Africa" vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.

Cette uvre fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou unique-ment disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.