Moravagine

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590170636
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine." This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."

The Astonished Man

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The extraordinary and much-requested first volume of Cendrars' autobiography, this account chronicles the author's exploits in the Foreign Legion--including the loss of his arm--before the narrative sets off across continents. From Africa to South America, Cendrars encounters everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. And to all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor, and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.

The Ten Thousand Things

Author: Maria Dermout
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

Dan Yack

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Peter Owen Modern Classic
ISBN: 9780720611571
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Centering on eccentric English millionaire shipowner, notorious hell-raiser, and the envy of all St Petersburg, Dan Yack, this strange travel yarn begins with the protagonist finding out that he is no longer wanted by his lover, Hedwiga. Rejection letter in hand, he eventually wanders into a nightclub to impulsively invite a handful of artists to accompany him on a world voyage via the Antarctic. As their journey progresses, the weather worsens and they enter pack-ice. Impatient, Dan orders the crew to land him and his three companions while they wait for a clear passage. They have enough provisions for a long, dark polar winter, but things do not run smoothly. The musician destroys their watches, the poet drifts off into serious daydreams, and the sculptor starts making statues of Dan Yack in ice. And Dan himself is worried--about time, about breaking his monocle, and about having no-one to love. But when the sun finally returns after the polar winter, no one could predict the surreal disaster that is about to unfold--a scenario involving a plum pudding, whales, women, and World War I.

A Night in the Forest

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Columbia : University of Missouri Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch

Author: Ladislav Klíma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Kl'ma believed that philosophy cannot be limited to speaking or writing; it must be lived. This led him to embark on a lifelong pursuit of becoming God, which he equated with Absolute Will. Drawing his greatest inspiration from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he developed his conceps of will and radical subjectivism in numerous essays, aphorisms, prose works and plays. In Kl'ma's only full-length work of fiction, and his only work translated into English, a series of journal entries chronicles Prince Sternenhoch's descent into madness. The German empire's top aristocrat and the Kaiser's favorite, Sternenhoch become the "lowliest worm" at the hands of his wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, yet eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation. Kl'ma explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with dark absurdist humor and comically grotesque, often obscene episodes.

To the End of the World

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Actresses
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
A Parisian actress in her late 70s, with an active stage and sex life, is held for questioning after the murder of a barkeeper. What follows is a superbly imaginative, often hilarious vivification of Paris in the late 1940s. "Without Cendrars, neither Miller nor Burroughs would have existed.

Gold

Author: Blaise Cendrars
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN: 9780720611755
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In January 1848, John Augustus Sutter, "the first American millionaire," was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter's Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter's vast domain. This is the story of this bankrupt Swiss paper maker who abandoned his family and made his way to America to seek his fortune. From New York he pushed westward, eventually acquiring a huge tract of land of which he was virtually an independent ruler and which was on the point of making him "the richest man in the world" when the Gold Rush brought disaster. For the last 30 years of his life, Sutter tried vainly to get compensation from the U.S. government. He died in 1880, a broken old man. This is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humor, and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told.

Shades of Sexuality

Author: Leamon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004649042
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
Shades of Sexuality: Colors and Sexual Identity in the Novels of Blaise Cendrars, by Amanda Leamon, is currently one of the few studies on the modernist poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars to be written in English. Of interest to scholars of Cendrars, Modernism, Twentieth Century French Literature and early Twentieth Century Art and Humanities, Shades of Sexuality is unique among the growing body of criticism and analysis of Cendrars' fiction in that it explores the ways in which Cendrars makes use of the spectrum of fragmented colors and other elements of disguise and trompe-l'oeil, both as an artistic device in the construction of the fictional tekst, and as a recurrent motif in the representation and exploration of the male subject and his relation to woman. The author demonstrates how Cendrars effects intersections of gender in the tekst through the manipulation of colors and their associations with femininity, ultimately undermining the illusory façade of male autonomy which dominates his fictional corpus.

The Memory of Tiresias

Author: Mikhail Iampolski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520914728
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
The concept of intertextuality has proven of inestimable value in recent attempts to understand the nature of literature and its relation to other systems of cultural meaning. In The Memory of Tiresias, Mikhail Iamposlki presents the first sustained attempt to develop a theory of cinematic intertextuality. Building on the insights of semiotics and contemporary film theory, Iampolski defines cinema as a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments intermixed with quotations he calls "textual anomalies." These challenge the normalization of meaning and seek to open reading out onto the unlimited field of cultural history, which is understood in texts as a semiotically active extract, already inscribed. Quotations obstruct mimesis and are consequently transformed in the process of semiosis, an operation that Iampolski defines as reading in an aura of enigma. In a series of brilliant analyses of films by D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Buñuel, he presents different strategies of intertextual reading in their work. His book suggests the continuing centrality of semiotic analysis and is certain to interest film historians and theorists, as well as readers in cultural and literary studies.