What do you think?
Maldoror and Poems
Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautremont (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 the 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, Gide and Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece.
Darkly poetic, this modern translation conveys the unique eloquence of the original text. This volume also contains a translation of the epigrammatic Poesies.
Darkly poetic, this modern translation conveys the unique eloquence of the original text. This volume also contains a translation of the epigrammatic Poesies.
287 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1869
About the author
Comte de Lautréamont
55 books504 followersComte de Lautréamont (French pronunciation: [lotʁeaˈmɔ̃]) was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguayan-born French poet. Little is known about his life and he wished to leave no memoirs. He died at the age of 24 in Paris.
His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists (similarly to Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and the Situationists. Comte de Lautréamont is one of the poètes maudits and a precursor to Surrealism.
His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists (similarly to Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and the Situationists. Comte de Lautréamont is one of the poètes maudits and a precursor to Surrealism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 116 reviews
February 14, 2023
Evil in its quintessence… Maldoror believes that he is an embodiment of pure evil… He is a singer of evil in all its manifestations…
Evil is universal and ubiquitous… Maldoror’s songs are a torrent of curses and vituperation… However his evil deeds are rater theoretical than practical… His songs are a series of sinister fantasies… And those wicked visions are often naively absurd…
He equally worships lice: “I pulled a female louse out of the hair of man. I slept with it for three consecutive nights, then I threw it into the pit. Destiny saw to it that human fecundation, which would have been impossible in other similar cases, was successful this time; and after a few days, thousands of monsters, crawling in a compact mass of matter, first saw the light of day…” and mathematics: “O rigorous mathematics, I have not forgotten you since your wise lessons, sweeter than honey, filtered into my heart like a refreshing wave. Instinctively, from the cradle, I had longed to drink from your source, older than the sun, and I continue to tread the sacred sanctuary of your solemn temple, I, the most faithful of your devotees.”
He sees the shining lamp in the cathedral and he starts fighting it exactly like Jacob fought angel…
And some of his evil doings are pretty ambivalent…
However Maldoror doesn’t kill a woman… He kills a glowworm.
Real evil is invisible and it does its malign work methodically, from day to day.
He who sings does not claim that his cavatinas are utterly unknown; on the contrary, he commends himself because his hero’s haughty and wicked thoughts are in all men.
Evil is universal and ubiquitous… Maldoror’s songs are a torrent of curses and vituperation… However his evil deeds are rater theoretical than practical… His songs are a series of sinister fantasies… And those wicked visions are often naively absurd…
He equally worships lice: “I pulled a female louse out of the hair of man. I slept with it for three consecutive nights, then I threw it into the pit. Destiny saw to it that human fecundation, which would have been impossible in other similar cases, was successful this time; and after a few days, thousands of monsters, crawling in a compact mass of matter, first saw the light of day…” and mathematics: “O rigorous mathematics, I have not forgotten you since your wise lessons, sweeter than honey, filtered into my heart like a refreshing wave. Instinctively, from the cradle, I had longed to drink from your source, older than the sun, and I continue to tread the sacred sanctuary of your solemn temple, I, the most faithful of your devotees.”
He sees the shining lamp in the cathedral and he starts fighting it exactly like Jacob fought angel…
He believes there is a kind of provocation in the attitude of this lamp, which he finds in the highest degree irritating because of its untimely presence. He says to himself that if there is a soul enclosed in the lamp it is cowardly of it not to answer his honest attack with sincerity. He beats the air with his sinewy arms, wishing the lamp would change into man; and then it would have a hard time for a quarter of an hour, he could promise it that.
And some of his evil doings are pretty ambivalent…
Meanwhile, a beautiful naked woman came and lay down at my feet. Sadly, I said to her, ‘You can get up.’ And I held out to her the hand with which the fratricide slits his sister’s throat. The shining worm, to me: ‘You, take a stone and kill her.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. And it said to me: ‘Beware, look to your safety, for you are the weaker and I the stronger. Her name is Prostitution.’
However Maldoror doesn’t kill a woman… He kills a glowworm.
Real evil is invisible and it does its malign work methodically, from day to day.
August 10, 2016
Introduction
--Maldoror
Introduction
--Poems
--Maldoror
Introduction
--Poems
November 16, 2017
To read Lautréamont; one is mugged by him in a mental dark alley, beaten with a cudgel of heresy, left marveling at the strange, beautiful bruises. If Pascal was a mathematician of the spirit, Lautréamont is the original gangster edgelord of literature: a refuter of Pascal’s humble trembling before God, adopting the very cadences of his method only to shove them into a burning ditch. Willful contradiction not as error but as sport — Lautréamont reasons and defiles his conclusions in the same breath, a boy-king who ascends the throne of God to moon the congegation.
Aside from non sequiturs, he layers image upon image, fastening his abusive accusations onto Romantic notions and established creed.
His pseudonym, Comte de Lautréamont, is a mask communicating bored disdain like a paper crown: flaunted, and discarded as soon as the whim passes. The work is a binary star system: Maldoror and Poésies, rotating around each other, casting fractured shadows with the latter acting like a crystal moon, more clearly disdainful, less diluted with asides. Maldoror is a gory, operatic hymn. Poésies is its dissembling twin, a work that bows and scrapes to convention, only to knife it under the fifth rib.
He revels in the redefinition of morality — presenting cruelty with the glee of a child smashing a hornet’s nest — the other him who presents the Poems pretends to rebuild ethical systems with Platonic sobriety, all while dropping sly bombs of subversion. Thesis meets antithesis; man collides with nature, and the result is neither synthesis nor reconciliation but a screaming collision that leaves moral shrapnel embedded in the battlefield. Elements are always at war. Man is a beast first and a spiritual being second in his book.
Like watching the "derailment of a worn-out locomotive:" sparks flying, while "a nightmare holds the pen," scribbling obscenities in the soot. The attitude of an upset schoolchild with the descriptive powers of a middle-aged poet. His contempt is palpable, and he lists off dozens of conventional and popular writers like criminals in a lineup, seeming to only like Racine for some reason, likening Voltaire to an "abortion." One can only judge the beauty of life, he intimates, by the sumptuous horror of death — and his every page is a mausoleum frescoed with the grotesque.
He delights in misleading the reader, offering sentiments like a firing squad offering a blindfold . An eye for the obscene, an ear for the blasphemous, Lautréamont dislocate literary tradition, snapping the tendons of narrative until his creaky prose moves with spasmodic, unnatural elegance like an etherized frog primed for dissection. He flays the reader by using the second person, wields a scalpel of poetic eccentricity in a sort of short-sighted nihilism, looking at Death in the face without flinching, but chuckling, invoking every insult in turn toward the pismires of humanity he loathes. — it is the enthusiastic and analytical disregard of propriety, not with the slow philosophical fondling of de Sade, but a cataloging of every wart and maggot buried in civilized flesh.
A raw vivisection, through which Lautréamont reframes poetry itself: spitting upon the old ways - the lyre of the gods, instead "chanting" the forbidden thoughts people fear to name. hideous truths strut about in glittering robes, nightscapes etched in flesh with a bone saw, screeching through a tremoring landscape one recognizes as genteel France of writers like George Sand, whom he name drops in his catalogue of execrable writers (in his estimation).
open to countless interpretations, appalling and occasionally sublime, equally sloppy and polished, unfocused as it is unhinged— as it is meant to be. Lautréamont is a saucy saboteur taking out the trash of his opinions with a trance-inducing, beckoning, skeletal hand. The cover image of the Penguin classics edition is especially apt. A detail from a painting called Buried Alive.
The enlightened reader, deliciously unsettled, must crawl into this tomb of wretchedness, be nailed up with the dust and dark until the ooze penetrates deep into their soul. Naked and writhing visions— and the author, a false Count, who died as early as he might have predicted, laughs like a hyena amid the ruins of a humankind.
Aside from non sequiturs, he layers image upon image, fastening his abusive accusations onto Romantic notions and established creed.
His pseudonym, Comte de Lautréamont, is a mask communicating bored disdain like a paper crown: flaunted, and discarded as soon as the whim passes. The work is a binary star system: Maldoror and Poésies, rotating around each other, casting fractured shadows with the latter acting like a crystal moon, more clearly disdainful, less diluted with asides. Maldoror is a gory, operatic hymn. Poésies is its dissembling twin, a work that bows and scrapes to convention, only to knife it under the fifth rib.
He revels in the redefinition of morality — presenting cruelty with the glee of a child smashing a hornet’s nest — the other him who presents the Poems pretends to rebuild ethical systems with Platonic sobriety, all while dropping sly bombs of subversion. Thesis meets antithesis; man collides with nature, and the result is neither synthesis nor reconciliation but a screaming collision that leaves moral shrapnel embedded in the battlefield. Elements are always at war. Man is a beast first and a spiritual being second in his book.
Like watching the "derailment of a worn-out locomotive:" sparks flying, while "a nightmare holds the pen," scribbling obscenities in the soot. The attitude of an upset schoolchild with the descriptive powers of a middle-aged poet. His contempt is palpable, and he lists off dozens of conventional and popular writers like criminals in a lineup, seeming to only like Racine for some reason, likening Voltaire to an "abortion." One can only judge the beauty of life, he intimates, by the sumptuous horror of death — and his every page is a mausoleum frescoed with the grotesque.
He delights in misleading the reader, offering sentiments like a firing squad offering a blindfold . An eye for the obscene, an ear for the blasphemous, Lautréamont dislocate literary tradition, snapping the tendons of narrative until his creaky prose moves with spasmodic, unnatural elegance like an etherized frog primed for dissection. He flays the reader by using the second person, wields a scalpel of poetic eccentricity in a sort of short-sighted nihilism, looking at Death in the face without flinching, but chuckling, invoking every insult in turn toward the pismires of humanity he loathes. — it is the enthusiastic and analytical disregard of propriety, not with the slow philosophical fondling of de Sade, but a cataloging of every wart and maggot buried in civilized flesh.
A raw vivisection, through which Lautréamont reframes poetry itself: spitting upon the old ways - the lyre of the gods, instead "chanting" the forbidden thoughts people fear to name. hideous truths strut about in glittering robes, nightscapes etched in flesh with a bone saw, screeching through a tremoring landscape one recognizes as genteel France of writers like George Sand, whom he name drops in his catalogue of execrable writers (in his estimation).
open to countless interpretations, appalling and occasionally sublime, equally sloppy and polished, unfocused as it is unhinged— as it is meant to be. Lautréamont is a saucy saboteur taking out the trash of his opinions with a trance-inducing, beckoning, skeletal hand. The cover image of the Penguin classics edition is especially apt. A detail from a painting called Buried Alive.
The enlightened reader, deliciously unsettled, must crawl into this tomb of wretchedness, be nailed up with the dust and dark until the ooze penetrates deep into their soul. Naked and writhing visions— and the author, a false Count, who died as early as he might have predicted, laughs like a hyena amid the ruins of a humankind.
April 5, 2019
There’s something childlike in Maldoror, something imaginative and exuberant, that remains untouched by the many books which claim it as an antecedent. Maldoror is exciting, libidinalizing and undisciplined, sprinting between strange setpieces with breakneck velocity; horror, ugliness and heresy are prosecuted with such enthusiasm that they’re superposed with your (hopefully) antithetical values as you read. This is in stark contrast to the legacy of surrealism, from Kafka to Magical Realism, which bureaucratizes / mundanizes the strange (or finds the strangeness in bureaucracy and mundanity). The nightmarish fantasy of Maldoror is vigorous, not foreshadowing surrealism’s traditional edict that dreams are callow and unpleasant; not really foreshadowing anything at all, since the canon won’t touch Lautreamont’s shambolic hallucinations with a ten-foot signifier.
I’ve seen it compared with romanticism, the gothic, decadence, surrealism, modernism and the films of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, and none of these comparisons are satisfactory. Take my favorite part of the book, as a cephalopod-geek, Maldoror’s gross-out soliloquy to the poisonous beauty of the octopus, impossible to reconcile with any well-established generic style;
O octopus of the silky glance! You whose soul is inseparable from mine; you, the most beautiful creature upon the terrestrial globe; you, chieftain of a seraglio of four hundred sucking-cups; you, in whom are nobly enthroned as though in their natural habitat, by a common agreement and with an indestructible bond, the divine graces and the sweet virtue of communication: why are you not with me, your belly of quicksilver pressed to my breast of aluminum, the two of us sitting here together upon a rock by the shore as we contemplate the spectacle I adore!
There’s something slightly adolescent about the Sadean inversion of good and evil, ugliness and beauty, eroticism and death, and something I find unbearably pretentious about dour stories whose only contribution to this snide reversal is a spiteful life-denying satire about the shallowness of everything. As a miserable and pessimistic failure myself, I appreciate the almost eulogistic zeal with which Maldoror treats the unbounded cathexis of our taboo desires, rather than submitting them to the deracinating humdrum of capital-L Literature’s cynical misanthropy--which is not to say that Maldoror doesn’t hate everything (it does), but it uses the exultant language of romanticism to treat subjects usually reserved for modernism’s depressive realism. The thing is, hatred is a deeply intensive state, not that you’d know that if you’ve only read novels about it.
I think we’re too embarrassed to write books about evil like this today, at least not without a thick gloss of irony. If there IS a descendent of Maldoror, it might be the high tonality of spirit in Gravity’s Rainbow’s slapstick blasphemy. While the parody-pulp of Pynchon has a certain wryness to it, its too rambunctious, too wild to be totally relegated to self aware pastiche. In a similar (boiling) vein, Lautreamont’s book is too hot blooded to be an index of evil, a conveyor belt of depravity as in some of its closest relatives like Justine and The Torture Garden. There's never anything more than the faintest family resemblance Maldoror has boisterous enthusiasm of a freakshow’s ringmaster, something I’d love to see more often.
I’ve seen it compared with romanticism, the gothic, decadence, surrealism, modernism and the films of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, and none of these comparisons are satisfactory. Take my favorite part of the book, as a cephalopod-geek, Maldoror’s gross-out soliloquy to the poisonous beauty of the octopus, impossible to reconcile with any well-established generic style;
O octopus of the silky glance! You whose soul is inseparable from mine; you, the most beautiful creature upon the terrestrial globe; you, chieftain of a seraglio of four hundred sucking-cups; you, in whom are nobly enthroned as though in their natural habitat, by a common agreement and with an indestructible bond, the divine graces and the sweet virtue of communication: why are you not with me, your belly of quicksilver pressed to my breast of aluminum, the two of us sitting here together upon a rock by the shore as we contemplate the spectacle I adore!
There’s something slightly adolescent about the Sadean inversion of good and evil, ugliness and beauty, eroticism and death, and something I find unbearably pretentious about dour stories whose only contribution to this snide reversal is a spiteful life-denying satire about the shallowness of everything. As a miserable and pessimistic failure myself, I appreciate the almost eulogistic zeal with which Maldoror treats the unbounded cathexis of our taboo desires, rather than submitting them to the deracinating humdrum of capital-L Literature’s cynical misanthropy--which is not to say that Maldoror doesn’t hate everything (it does), but it uses the exultant language of romanticism to treat subjects usually reserved for modernism’s depressive realism. The thing is, hatred is a deeply intensive state, not that you’d know that if you’ve only read novels about it.
I think we’re too embarrassed to write books about evil like this today, at least not without a thick gloss of irony. If there IS a descendent of Maldoror, it might be the high tonality of spirit in Gravity’s Rainbow’s slapstick blasphemy. While the parody-pulp of Pynchon has a certain wryness to it, its too rambunctious, too wild to be totally relegated to self aware pastiche. In a similar (boiling) vein, Lautreamont’s book is too hot blooded to be an index of evil, a conveyor belt of depravity as in some of its closest relatives like Justine and The Torture Garden. There's never anything more than the faintest family resemblance Maldoror has boisterous enthusiasm of a freakshow’s ringmaster, something I’d love to see more often.
Read
December 11, 2013Our author, whether writing as Comte de Lautréamont or Isidore Ducasse, is a master of negation, contradiction, and contrast.
Maldoror (and Poems) is a great work. It's audacious, original, startling, heartfelt, insincere, sincere, brutal, funny, outrageous, paradoxical, inspirational. It is the opposite of itself. It's one (or two) of a kind.
Some will be attracted to the book because it is sensational. Some will be repelled for the exact same reason. I've commented earlier and elsewhere that--though I could be regarded as a jaded reader--I found some of the passages in Maldoror remarkably difficult and painful. Though I don't think I am any kind of sadistic thrill-seeker, I'd say that the preceding sentence is actually evidence of the strength (and peculiar nature) of the book. That's because the author does not merely hammer upon us with a barrage of violent absurdities (though some will perceive it that way). On the contrary, he knows how to enlist our sympathy without seeming to do so. Or perhaps he simply exploits our humanity.
In a previous pre-review, I objected to the association of this text with surrealism. The surrealists were inspired by it, and the text has some relationship to the later developments of surrealism, but I think it would give a very distorted picture to suppose there is a strong relationship here. I also objected to the cover art, which is a petty gripe, but seriously... this is not Dracula. One more objection I raised was against the main description attached to our Goodreads record. Yeah, well, this is a tough book to categorize or accurately portray in a capsule, and I suspect that readers will be highly divided on just how this book could be fairly described.
Which brings me to another point. I think if you assemble twelve fans of this book, they will all eye one another very suspiciously. None will trust the others' motives or rationale for liking--or loving--this book. Then, one may also feel a bit uncomfortable looking in the mirror after reading this. You may suspect your own reflection, or may recoil in shame at the piercing and accusatory glance which confronts you.
Thus, of course, we must have a very suspicious and uncomfortable relationship with the author too--or with the author as we imagine him to be.
I referred, a few times above, to contradictions. It appears to me that the author employed an interesting strategy with remarkable results. It appears that he wrote, then returned and revised his sentences by arbitrarily inverting them, throwing in a "not," or other negation just when its appearance would be least intuitive, may be quite irrational at first glance, but which also invites a new perspective. This appears to happen in Maldoror (I perceived it as happening more frequently starting with "Book 3" of Maldoror) and it is developed to its extreme when we come to the anti-book "Poems."
I think Maldoror will always be the main focus of readers' attention. It's the only "complete" work. But let's not neglect "poems." I was looking forward to seeing how the author would go about writing a sort of counterpoint to his own work, which is what I expected "poems" to be, and I do like the idea of deliberately pursuing a literary goal which may be counter to one's nature. However, it turned out quite different from my expectation, because "poems" is a 95% facetious work. First of all, I keep putting quotes around "poems," because, as far I can tell this could be a title for the work, but it is not a collection of poems... if anything, it is a tirade against poetry. But anyway, if readers were prone to misconstrue Maldoror, I think they're doubly likely to be deceived by "poems." Here, it appears that our author has successfully defended Maldoror by anticipating the objections of his harshest (imagined) critics, and then presenting their arguments in such extreme and absurd style as to render the criticism ridiculous. When reading something of this sort, coming from this particular author, knowing what we know of the work he has previously produced, knowing his age and literary leanings, this should be an obvious caution: If you read something which seems patently absurd in "poems," you should take it as a sure sign that the author was aware of the absurdity--and it was intentional.
But this does not preclude the %5 sincerity which may be buried in here. The author's approach, and the nature of his topic, ensure that his writing will always remain somewhat mysterious and paradoxical. What exactly were his most sincere thoughts cannot be easily or certainly deduced... there is a permanent air of doubt, which highlights the irony of the fact that "poems", more than anything else, is an argument AGAINST doubt.
Which leaves the strongest impression? The terror of sin which is communicated in-between the lines of Maldoror, or the savoring of sin and the sadistic joy of annihilating mankind and oneself in the process? Which is stronger, the advocacy of passionate and anarchic literature which peeks through the cracks of "poems," or the surface moralizing and overt condemnation of all expressions of sorrow and negative passion... well, positive passion too. In the end, is Maldoror truly "poems" in disguise, while "poems" is a concealed Maldoror? They both affirm one another covertly, while expressly repudiating one another.
-----------------------------------
In my pre-review I also wrote a few things of which I will preserve a snippet or two. (Later, I may revise again to introduce a few quotes from the work into the section above):
"The author, in fact, may have been strongly interested in teaching good, by causing us to be revolted by evil. His evil protagonist is a sensitive soul too, and at times has a noble desire to see evidence of the goodness of man, but he's also so terribly cynical, on a scale we rarely see in any form of literature, and the author is such an effective devil's advocate, that he makes the reader experience both the thrill and the shame of his devilishness."
"He's also infinitely self-contradictory and hypocritical, thus plunging the reader into an ethical and experiential morass. Who knows what will come out in the end?"
Maldoror (and Poems) is a great work. It's audacious, original, startling, heartfelt, insincere, sincere, brutal, funny, outrageous, paradoxical, inspirational. It is the opposite of itself. It's one (or two) of a kind.
Some will be attracted to the book because it is sensational. Some will be repelled for the exact same reason. I've commented earlier and elsewhere that--though I could be regarded as a jaded reader--I found some of the passages in Maldoror remarkably difficult and painful. Though I don't think I am any kind of sadistic thrill-seeker, I'd say that the preceding sentence is actually evidence of the strength (and peculiar nature) of the book. That's because the author does not merely hammer upon us with a barrage of violent absurdities (though some will perceive it that way). On the contrary, he knows how to enlist our sympathy without seeming to do so. Or perhaps he simply exploits our humanity.
In a previous pre-review, I objected to the association of this text with surrealism. The surrealists were inspired by it, and the text has some relationship to the later developments of surrealism, but I think it would give a very distorted picture to suppose there is a strong relationship here. I also objected to the cover art, which is a petty gripe, but seriously... this is not Dracula. One more objection I raised was against the main description attached to our Goodreads record. Yeah, well, this is a tough book to categorize or accurately portray in a capsule, and I suspect that readers will be highly divided on just how this book could be fairly described.
Which brings me to another point. I think if you assemble twelve fans of this book, they will all eye one another very suspiciously. None will trust the others' motives or rationale for liking--or loving--this book. Then, one may also feel a bit uncomfortable looking in the mirror after reading this. You may suspect your own reflection, or may recoil in shame at the piercing and accusatory glance which confronts you.
Thus, of course, we must have a very suspicious and uncomfortable relationship with the author too--or with the author as we imagine him to be.
I referred, a few times above, to contradictions. It appears to me that the author employed an interesting strategy with remarkable results. It appears that he wrote, then returned and revised his sentences by arbitrarily inverting them, throwing in a "not," or other negation just when its appearance would be least intuitive, may be quite irrational at first glance, but which also invites a new perspective. This appears to happen in Maldoror (I perceived it as happening more frequently starting with "Book 3" of Maldoror) and it is developed to its extreme when we come to the anti-book "Poems."
I think Maldoror will always be the main focus of readers' attention. It's the only "complete" work. But let's not neglect "poems." I was looking forward to seeing how the author would go about writing a sort of counterpoint to his own work, which is what I expected "poems" to be, and I do like the idea of deliberately pursuing a literary goal which may be counter to one's nature. However, it turned out quite different from my expectation, because "poems" is a 95% facetious work. First of all, I keep putting quotes around "poems," because, as far I can tell this could be a title for the work, but it is not a collection of poems... if anything, it is a tirade against poetry. But anyway, if readers were prone to misconstrue Maldoror, I think they're doubly likely to be deceived by "poems." Here, it appears that our author has successfully defended Maldoror by anticipating the objections of his harshest (imagined) critics, and then presenting their arguments in such extreme and absurd style as to render the criticism ridiculous. When reading something of this sort, coming from this particular author, knowing what we know of the work he has previously produced, knowing his age and literary leanings, this should be an obvious caution: If you read something which seems patently absurd in "poems," you should take it as a sure sign that the author was aware of the absurdity--and it was intentional.
But this does not preclude the %5 sincerity which may be buried in here. The author's approach, and the nature of his topic, ensure that his writing will always remain somewhat mysterious and paradoxical. What exactly were his most sincere thoughts cannot be easily or certainly deduced... there is a permanent air of doubt, which highlights the irony of the fact that "poems", more than anything else, is an argument AGAINST doubt.
Which leaves the strongest impression? The terror of sin which is communicated in-between the lines of Maldoror, or the savoring of sin and the sadistic joy of annihilating mankind and oneself in the process? Which is stronger, the advocacy of passionate and anarchic literature which peeks through the cracks of "poems," or the surface moralizing and overt condemnation of all expressions of sorrow and negative passion... well, positive passion too. In the end, is Maldoror truly "poems" in disguise, while "poems" is a concealed Maldoror? They both affirm one another covertly, while expressly repudiating one another.
-----------------------------------
In my pre-review I also wrote a few things of which I will preserve a snippet or two. (Later, I may revise again to introduce a few quotes from the work into the section above):
"The author, in fact, may have been strongly interested in teaching good, by causing us to be revolted by evil. His evil protagonist is a sensitive soul too, and at times has a noble desire to see evidence of the goodness of man, but he's also so terribly cynical, on a scale we rarely see in any form of literature, and the author is such an effective devil's advocate, that he makes the reader experience both the thrill and the shame of his devilishness."
"He's also infinitely self-contradictory and hypocritical, thus plunging the reader into an ethical and experiential morass. Who knows what will come out in the end?"
March 25, 2022
This doesn’t have a shape. It’s crass and over-embellished, but still, it has this weird conviction that what it has to say is important and moving, kind of like the way a kid explains the world to you. I liked it a lot. Oh and also Maldoror has sex with a shark. That was cool.
December 5, 2014
Maldoror
Read again: Sept 25-28
1st Book
page 33: "Show me a man who is good..."
Section 9: Ocean Invocation.
page 57: "remember this: we are on this mastless vessel to suffer..."
page 62: "Sad as the universe, as beautiful as suicide."
2nd Book
section 4: author attacks God: "You will do me the favor, O Creator..."
page 73: "He is struggling in vain in the century into which he has been thrown..."
Section 7: The Hermaphrodite.
page 87: "Only when you hear..."
Section 9: Hymn of Glorification to Lice.
Section 13: Sinking ship, Maldoror mates with a shark.
3rd Book
page 125: "I received life as a wound..."
Section 5: God leaves behind a single strand of hair after visiting a brothel.
4th Book
Section 4: "I am filthy, I am riddled with lice..."
page 167: "I dreamt I had entered the body of a hog..."
5th Book
Section 1: "The most soothing potion..."
page 189: "My subjectivity and the Creator..."
page 195: "Oh!, if instead of being a hell..."
6th Book
page 216: "He is as handsome as the chance encounter..."
page 227: "Whenever I think of you..."
page 278: "It is a horrible thing to feel..."
----
Maldoror, he wanders around encountering bizarre characters, committing crimes and spouting sensible-nonsense. Maldoror... 'mal dolor'?
"As one of the poètes maudits (accursed poets), he was elevated to the Surrealist Panthéon beside Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and acknowledged as a direct precursor to Surrealism. André Gide regarded him — even more than Rimbaud — as the most significant figure, as the "gate-master of tomorrow's literature", meriting Breton and Soupault "to have recognized and announced the literary and ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont"."
Yeah, no kidding.
Some bits I liked:
"I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus. I know neither the water of rivers nor the dew of clouds. An enormous, mushroom with umbelliferous stalks is growing on my nape, as on a dunghill. Sitting on a shapeless piece of furniture, I have not moved my limbs now for four centuries. My feet have taken root in the ground; up to my belly, they form a sort of tenacious vegetation, full of filthy parasites; this vegetation no longer has anything in common with other plants, nor is it flesh. And yet my heart beats. How could it beat, if the rottenness and miasmata of my corpse (I dare not say body), did not nourish it abundantly? A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain. In my right armpit there is a chameleon which is perpetually chasing them, to avoid starving to death: everyone must live. But when one party has completely foiled the cunning tricks of the other, they like nothing better than to leave one another in peace and suck the delicate fat which covers my sides: I am used to it. An evil snake has eaten my verge and taken its place; the filthy creature has made me a eunuch. Oh if only I could have defended myself with my paralysed hands; but I rather think they have changed into logs. However that may be, it is important to state that my red blood no longer flows there. Two little hedgehogs, which have stopped growing, threw the inside of my testicles to a dog, who did not turn up his nose at it: and they lodged inside the carefully washed epidermis. My anus has been penetrated by a crab; encouraged by my sluggishness, he guards the entrance with his pincers, and causes me a lot of pain! Two medusae crossed the seas, immediately enticed by a hope which was not disappointed. They looked attentively at the two fleshy parts which form the human backside, and, clinging on to their convex curve, they so crushed them by constant pressure that the two lumps of flesh have disappeared, while two monsters from the realm of viscosity remain, equal in colour, shape, and ferocity. Do not speak of my spinal column, as it is a sword...Yes, yes...I was not paying attention...your request is a fair one. You wished to know, did you not, how it came to be implanted vertically in my back. I cannot remember very clearly; however, if I decide to take for a memory what was perhaps only a dream, I can tell you that man, when he found out that I had vowed to live disease-ridden and motionless until I had conquered the Creator, crept up behind me on tiptoe, but not so quietly that I did not hear him. For a short moment, I felt nothing. This sword was buried up to the hilt between the shoulder-blades of the festive bull, and his bones shuddered like an earthquake. Athletes, mechanical experts, philosophers and doctors have tried, in turn, all kinds of methods. They did not know that the evil man does cannot be undone! I forgave them for the depth of their native ignorance, and acknowledged them with a slow movement of my eyelids. Traveller, when you pass near by me, do not address the least word of consolation to me, I implore you. You will weaken my courage. Leave me to kindle my tenacity at the flame of voluntary martyrdom. Go away...let me not inspire in you any act of piety. Hatred is stranger than you think; its action is inexplicable, like the broken appearance of a stick in water. Such as you see me, I can still make sorties as far as the walls of heaven at the head of a legion of murderers, and then come back and, resuming this posture, meditate again on noble projects of vengeance. Adieu, I shall delay you no longer; and, so that you may learn a lesson and keep out of harm's way, reflect on the fatal destiny which led me to revolt, when I was perhaps born good!"
----
"O Ocean, you remind me somewhat of the bluish marks one sees on the battered backs of cabin boys.”
----
"Farewell until eternity, where you and I shall not find ourselves together."
----
"He was... as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table!"
Read again: Sept 25-28
1st Book
page 33: "Show me a man who is good..."
Section 9: Ocean Invocation.
page 57: "remember this: we are on this mastless vessel to suffer..."
page 62: "Sad as the universe, as beautiful as suicide."
2nd Book
section 4: author attacks God: "You will do me the favor, O Creator..."
page 73: "He is struggling in vain in the century into which he has been thrown..."
Section 7: The Hermaphrodite.
page 87: "Only when you hear..."
Section 9: Hymn of Glorification to Lice.
Section 13: Sinking ship, Maldoror mates with a shark.
3rd Book
page 125: "I received life as a wound..."
Section 5: God leaves behind a single strand of hair after visiting a brothel.
4th Book
Section 4: "I am filthy, I am riddled with lice..."
page 167: "I dreamt I had entered the body of a hog..."
5th Book
Section 1: "The most soothing potion..."
page 189: "My subjectivity and the Creator..."
page 195: "Oh!, if instead of being a hell..."
6th Book
page 216: "He is as handsome as the chance encounter..."
page 227: "Whenever I think of you..."
page 278: "It is a horrible thing to feel..."
----
Maldoror, he wanders around encountering bizarre characters, committing crimes and spouting sensible-nonsense. Maldoror... 'mal dolor'?
"As one of the poètes maudits (accursed poets), he was elevated to the Surrealist Panthéon beside Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and acknowledged as a direct precursor to Surrealism. André Gide regarded him — even more than Rimbaud — as the most significant figure, as the "gate-master of tomorrow's literature", meriting Breton and Soupault "to have recognized and announced the literary and ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont"."
Yeah, no kidding.
Some bits I liked:
"I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus. I know neither the water of rivers nor the dew of clouds. An enormous, mushroom with umbelliferous stalks is growing on my nape, as on a dunghill. Sitting on a shapeless piece of furniture, I have not moved my limbs now for four centuries. My feet have taken root in the ground; up to my belly, they form a sort of tenacious vegetation, full of filthy parasites; this vegetation no longer has anything in common with other plants, nor is it flesh. And yet my heart beats. How could it beat, if the rottenness and miasmata of my corpse (I dare not say body), did not nourish it abundantly? A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain. In my right armpit there is a chameleon which is perpetually chasing them, to avoid starving to death: everyone must live. But when one party has completely foiled the cunning tricks of the other, they like nothing better than to leave one another in peace and suck the delicate fat which covers my sides: I am used to it. An evil snake has eaten my verge and taken its place; the filthy creature has made me a eunuch. Oh if only I could have defended myself with my paralysed hands; but I rather think they have changed into logs. However that may be, it is important to state that my red blood no longer flows there. Two little hedgehogs, which have stopped growing, threw the inside of my testicles to a dog, who did not turn up his nose at it: and they lodged inside the carefully washed epidermis. My anus has been penetrated by a crab; encouraged by my sluggishness, he guards the entrance with his pincers, and causes me a lot of pain! Two medusae crossed the seas, immediately enticed by a hope which was not disappointed. They looked attentively at the two fleshy parts which form the human backside, and, clinging on to their convex curve, they so crushed them by constant pressure that the two lumps of flesh have disappeared, while two monsters from the realm of viscosity remain, equal in colour, shape, and ferocity. Do not speak of my spinal column, as it is a sword...Yes, yes...I was not paying attention...your request is a fair one. You wished to know, did you not, how it came to be implanted vertically in my back. I cannot remember very clearly; however, if I decide to take for a memory what was perhaps only a dream, I can tell you that man, when he found out that I had vowed to live disease-ridden and motionless until I had conquered the Creator, crept up behind me on tiptoe, but not so quietly that I did not hear him. For a short moment, I felt nothing. This sword was buried up to the hilt between the shoulder-blades of the festive bull, and his bones shuddered like an earthquake. Athletes, mechanical experts, philosophers and doctors have tried, in turn, all kinds of methods. They did not know that the evil man does cannot be undone! I forgave them for the depth of their native ignorance, and acknowledged them with a slow movement of my eyelids. Traveller, when you pass near by me, do not address the least word of consolation to me, I implore you. You will weaken my courage. Leave me to kindle my tenacity at the flame of voluntary martyrdom. Go away...let me not inspire in you any act of piety. Hatred is stranger than you think; its action is inexplicable, like the broken appearance of a stick in water. Such as you see me, I can still make sorties as far as the walls of heaven at the head of a legion of murderers, and then come back and, resuming this posture, meditate again on noble projects of vengeance. Adieu, I shall delay you no longer; and, so that you may learn a lesson and keep out of harm's way, reflect on the fatal destiny which led me to revolt, when I was perhaps born good!"
----
"O Ocean, you remind me somewhat of the bluish marks one sees on the battered backs of cabin boys.”
----
"Farewell until eternity, where you and I shall not find ourselves together."
----
"He was... as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table!"
August 29, 2020
In my last review, for Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps, I noted that novel's similarities with Lautréamont's sleazy classic and then, immediately afterward, took Maldoror down off of the shelf to make sure that I was correct in comparing the two novels. It had been many years since I'd read Maldoror and I found myself rather quickly immersed in the novel's matrix. Phew, after this reread I can affirm the justice of my comparison, but I also found that Lautréamont's book is far superior and well worth a read, despite its extreme, outre subject matter--ostensibly "the problem of evil," which includes murder, torture, child molestation, pederasty (I think here simply homosexuality), and my favorite: sex with sharks. What makes the novel great aren't its transgressive topics--although I'm not at all against such subject matter, as these things exist and writers do well often to confront them with words--but its literary games and the way the novel plays ceaselessly with literary conventions and tropes to present, confuse, and, at the same time, lay bare aspects of human nature which all-too-often we shrug off and ignore.
Steeped in hyperbole, Maldoror uses every trick in the book, every literary register, first, second, and third person narration, reportage, meta-narrative, and personal narration to take us into, outside of, and through all of these scenes of disaffection and carnage, plumbing the depths of degradation, betrayal, and plain old nastiness, to present its many episodes while constantly framing, re-framing, and negating all of these possibilities of fictional discourse to become something of a classic of literary style while at the same time seeking, literarily, also to destroy itself. The most exciting aspect of the text, for me, is how this fictionalized author enters constantly via metanarrative to tell us how or why he will recount something, endlessly forcing the reader to evaluate what is told through prisms of form or the way in which the events recounted are re-counted, framed, re-presented. I should think that any astute reader will bray at being told what to think and how to read a passage, but the techniques seem only to ridicule the text's own strategies rather than lionize them, leaving us hyper-aware of all of these literary strategies, both their worth and worthlessness in such a hyper-mediated work. This works not to temper the evil deeds described, but rather is the perfect medium in which to present them as only such outrageous images and narratives can stand up to so much literary manipulation.
Of course the surrealists and other later imaginative writers loved the novel, but I think not only for its often absurd and violent images, but rather also for its use of literary form to make something of a mockery of all of our precious literary conventions. You could describe Maldoror as a series of prose poems, or a series of fever dreams of violence and carnage, or even criminal acts--though many are too absurd to frame in any such realistic way, or even as an endless preface to itself, for there is no real through narrative, only another episode until it just stops, never really having told us much of anything other than to pay attention to all of the things it promises to tell us later. What else is there to say about evil? It's all in our heads and in the way we look at it.
Steeped in hyperbole, Maldoror uses every trick in the book, every literary register, first, second, and third person narration, reportage, meta-narrative, and personal narration to take us into, outside of, and through all of these scenes of disaffection and carnage, plumbing the depths of degradation, betrayal, and plain old nastiness, to present its many episodes while constantly framing, re-framing, and negating all of these possibilities of fictional discourse to become something of a classic of literary style while at the same time seeking, literarily, also to destroy itself. The most exciting aspect of the text, for me, is how this fictionalized author enters constantly via metanarrative to tell us how or why he will recount something, endlessly forcing the reader to evaluate what is told through prisms of form or the way in which the events recounted are re-counted, framed, re-presented. I should think that any astute reader will bray at being told what to think and how to read a passage, but the techniques seem only to ridicule the text's own strategies rather than lionize them, leaving us hyper-aware of all of these literary strategies, both their worth and worthlessness in such a hyper-mediated work. This works not to temper the evil deeds described, but rather is the perfect medium in which to present them as only such outrageous images and narratives can stand up to so much literary manipulation.
Of course the surrealists and other later imaginative writers loved the novel, but I think not only for its often absurd and violent images, but rather also for its use of literary form to make something of a mockery of all of our precious literary conventions. You could describe Maldoror as a series of prose poems, or a series of fever dreams of violence and carnage, or even criminal acts--though many are too absurd to frame in any such realistic way, or even as an endless preface to itself, for there is no real through narrative, only another episode until it just stops, never really having told us much of anything other than to pay attention to all of the things it promises to tell us later. What else is there to say about evil? It's all in our heads and in the way we look at it.
July 17, 2018
"Para construir mecanicamente o miolo de um conto sonífero, não basta dissecar parvoíces e embrutecer intensamente, com doses repetidas, a inteligência do leitor, de maneira a tornar paralíticas para o resto da vida as suas faculdades, através da lei infalível da fadiga; é preciso, além disso, com um bom fluido magnético, pô-lo engenhosamente na impossibilidade sonâmbula de se mover, forçando-o, contra a sua natureza, a obscurecer os olhos devido à fixidez dos vossos."
Enquanto lia este livro, lembrei-me muitas vezes de umas expressões da avó de Amos Oz:
"Aquele sábio tornou-se tão inteligente que já não percebe quase nada."
"Dói tanto, tanto, tanto que começa a dar-me vontade de rir."
É que estava a detestá-lo tanto que não conseguia parar de lê-lo.
Abominei as cenas asquerosas relatadas e enfastiei-me com a escrita que me pareceu básica e um pouco infantil. No entanto, entendo a valorização que se lhe deu, e dá, pois nunca li nada que se lhe comparasse.
Os Cantos de Maldoror é um poema em prosa, do género (mais ou menos) Fantástico, constituído por seis partes (os cantos) que relata as selvajarias cometidas por Maldoror, um anjo maligno, que luta contra Deus e os homens.
Quem o quiser conhecer, prepare-se para a bicharada (tarântulas, escaravelhos, aranhas,...) e cenas horríveis que vão da bestialidade ao canibalismo.
Poesia I
Sinceramente, não sei o que é.
Poesia II
Acho que são aforismos, não tenho a certeza.
"Não se pode julgar a beleza da vida senão pela da morte."
"O amor não se confunde com a poesia."
"A mulher está aos meus pés!"
eu não, cruzes/credo!
André Breton considerava Isidore Ducasse uma "revelação total que parece exceder as possibilidades humanas" e o precursor do Surrealismo. Léon Bloy achava que era um louco, "uma ruína humana completa". (Estou com Bloy...)
=================================
"O melhor meio de persuadir consiste em não persuadir."
— Isidore Ducasse - Conde de Lautréamont
Isidore Ducasse nasceu em Montevideu, Uruguai, no dia 4 de Abril de 1846 e morreu em Paris, França, no dia 24 de Novembro de 1870.
Filho de franceses, aos treze anos foi para um colégio interno em França. Publicou os Cantos em 1869, com o pseudónimo
Conde de Lautréamont. Morreu aos 24 anos, no seu quarto de hotel, não se sabe de quê. A informação sobre a sua vida é escassa; mesmo sobre a única foto que existe não há certeza de que seja efectivamente de Ducasse.
Enquanto lia este livro, lembrei-me muitas vezes de umas expressões da avó de Amos Oz:
"Aquele sábio tornou-se tão inteligente que já não percebe quase nada."
"Dói tanto, tanto, tanto que começa a dar-me vontade de rir."
É que estava a detestá-lo tanto que não conseguia parar de lê-lo.
Abominei as cenas asquerosas relatadas e enfastiei-me com a escrita que me pareceu básica e um pouco infantil. No entanto, entendo a valorização que se lhe deu, e dá, pois nunca li nada que se lhe comparasse.
Os Cantos de Maldoror é um poema em prosa, do género (mais ou menos) Fantástico, constituído por seis partes (os cantos) que relata as selvajarias cometidas por Maldoror, um anjo maligno, que luta contra Deus e os homens.
Quem o quiser conhecer, prepare-se para a bicharada (tarântulas, escaravelhos, aranhas,...) e cenas horríveis que vão da bestialidade ao canibalismo.
Poesia I
Sinceramente, não sei o que é.
Poesia II
Acho que são aforismos, não tenho a certeza.
"Não se pode julgar a beleza da vida senão pela da morte."
"O amor não se confunde com a poesia."
"A mulher está aos meus pés!"
André Breton considerava Isidore Ducasse uma "revelação total que parece exceder as possibilidades humanas" e o precursor do Surrealismo. Léon Bloy achava que era um louco, "uma ruína humana completa". (Estou com Bloy...)
=================================
"O melhor meio de persuadir consiste em não persuadir."
— Isidore Ducasse - Conde de Lautréamont
Isidore Ducasse nasceu em Montevideu, Uruguai, no dia 4 de Abril de 1846 e morreu em Paris, França, no dia 24 de Novembro de 1870.
Filho de franceses, aos treze anos foi para um colégio interno em França. Publicou os Cantos em 1869, com o pseudónimo
Conde de Lautréamont. Morreu aos 24 anos, no seu quarto de hotel, não se sabe de quê. A informação sobre a sua vida é escassa; mesmo sobre a única foto que existe não há certeza de que seja efectivamente de Ducasse.
April 21, 2019
THIRD BOOK
3
'Eagle, how revolting you are! You are redder than a pool of blood! Though you hold a palpitating heart in your beak,you are so covered with wounds that you can hardly stand upright on your feathered claws; and,without relaxing the tight grip of your beak, you are staggering beside the dragon which is dying in the throes of frightful pain. Victory has been hard to achieve; no matter, you have won it; one must at least tell the truth...You are acting according to the laws of reason as, moving away from the dragon's corpse, you divest yourself of the eagle's form. And so, Maldoror, you are the victor! And so, Maldoror, you have defeated Hope! From this moment, despair will prey on your purest substance! From this moment you will return, with a firm step, to your career of evil!Although I have become, so to speak, dulled to suffering, the last blow you struck the dragon did not fail to have its effect on me. Judge for yourself if I am suffering! But you frighten me. See,see that man fleeing in the distance. The busy foliage of malediction has grown on him, excellent soil; he is accursed and accursed. Where are your sandals taking you? Where are you going,tottering forward like a sleepwalker on a roof? May your perverse destiny be fulfilled! Maldoror,adieu! Adieu, until eternity, when we will not be together!'
3
'Eagle, how revolting you are! You are redder than a pool of blood! Though you hold a palpitating heart in your beak,you are so covered with wounds that you can hardly stand upright on your feathered claws; and,without relaxing the tight grip of your beak, you are staggering beside the dragon which is dying in the throes of frightful pain. Victory has been hard to achieve; no matter, you have won it; one must at least tell the truth...You are acting according to the laws of reason as, moving away from the dragon's corpse, you divest yourself of the eagle's form. And so, Maldoror, you are the victor! And so, Maldoror, you have defeated Hope! From this moment, despair will prey on your purest substance! From this moment you will return, with a firm step, to your career of evil!Although I have become, so to speak, dulled to suffering, the last blow you struck the dragon did not fail to have its effect on me. Judge for yourself if I am suffering! But you frighten me. See,see that man fleeing in the distance. The busy foliage of malediction has grown on him, excellent soil; he is accursed and accursed. Where are your sandals taking you? Where are you going,tottering forward like a sleepwalker on a roof? May your perverse destiny be fulfilled! Maldoror,adieu! Adieu, until eternity, when we will not be together!'
January 2, 2017
WOW! Where in the hell has THIS book been all my life? This is incredible. I've read nothing like it.
The book essentially follows the exploits of an evil supernatural creature (?) called Maldoror. Most chapters are self-contained vignettes. There are wild scenes of violence, confusing philosophical rants, followed up with symbolic, dream-like chapters.
It's cruel, poetic, bitter, melodramatic, sadistic, misanthropic in the extreme, and at times utterly baffling. It's full of tangents, often in mid-sentence (with some very LONG sentences.) Much of it is written in a stream of consciousness, symbolically or allegorically. Above all, to me at least, it's darkly beautiful, thought provoking and always surprising.
This is nihilism like I've never seen in print. Nihilism toward God, society, decency, and yes, even the readers' patience at times. It feels like anything can happen, a totally unhindered (unhinged?) imagination.
Possible spoilers in this paragraph:
There's human/shark copulations, a sad monologue by a hair left in a filthy brothel by a murderer, apocalyptic lice breeding and a drunk God getting shat upon. Oh that's nothing, in one scene Maldoror gets so worked up talking about his own intoxicating semen, he insists armies of men will one day slaughter each other en masse just to smell it. Yes. Really.
The unpredictability of it kept me fascinated, it's impossible to tell where this author will go next. One thing is guaranteed -- it will be somewhere in the darker recesses of the human psyche.
But it's not the shocking nature of it I really loved. I've read plenty of shocking tripe. What sticks is the beautiful, evocative prose and the haunting mood it generates. This really feels like something forbidden, and the author seems like he _really_ means it.
I find myself in a mood for surreal and decadent works these days, and this fits the bill, many times over on both counts. This book was so disturbing, it's hard to believe such a thing was published a century and a half ago.
Here's some samples, showing examples of the style.
An image of God:
"Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting--with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen--he who calls himself the Creator! He was holding in his hand the rotten body of a dead man, carrying it in turn from his eyes to his nose and from his nose to his mouth; and once it reached his mouth, one can guess what he did with it."
While watching a ship sink he decides to take this upon himself:
"They could not escape! To make assurance doubly sure, I had gone to fetch my double-barreled rifle so that if some survivor was tempted to approach the rocks of the shore to escape imminent death, a bullet in the shoulder would shatter his arm and prevent him from carrying out his plan."
More raging against God:
"The Eternal One has created the world as it is: He would have been very wise if, in the time strictly necessary to break a woman's skull with hammer-blows, He had forgotten his sidereal majesty for a moment to reveal to us the mysteries amid which our existence stifles like a fish flailing on the ship's deck."
He despises the human voice:
"Oh! when you hear the avalanche of snow falling from the high mountain; the lioness in the barren desert lamenting the disappearance of its cubs; the tempest accomplishing its destined purpose; the condemned man groaning in prison on the eve of his execution; and the savage octopus telling the waves of the sea of his victory over swimmers and the shipwrecked, then you have to acknowledge it: are not these majestic voices finer than the sniggering of men?"
This is something that could only have been written with the anger, testosterone and enthusiasm of youth. He revels in it, letting his imagination go unhindered. There's a few things I wouldn't even quote here they're so shocking. The prose has a poetry to it that is beautiful regardless what he is speaking of. The other thing is, despite it's age, like Beethoven's dissonant "Grosse Fuge", this feels very modern, it's so strange it will likely feel fresh for a long time to come.
There are certainly parts of the book which outshine others. The philosophical rambles can be baffling and feel rather aimless. The first "book" (of six) isn't quite as good as the later ones, although it has it's moments. And finally, I have no doubt this isn't to everyone's taste, but I loved it. As he starts off, "It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."
The book essentially follows the exploits of an evil supernatural creature (?) called Maldoror. Most chapters are self-contained vignettes. There are wild scenes of violence, confusing philosophical rants, followed up with symbolic, dream-like chapters.
It's cruel, poetic, bitter, melodramatic, sadistic, misanthropic in the extreme, and at times utterly baffling. It's full of tangents, often in mid-sentence (with some very LONG sentences.) Much of it is written in a stream of consciousness, symbolically or allegorically. Above all, to me at least, it's darkly beautiful, thought provoking and always surprising.
This is nihilism like I've never seen in print. Nihilism toward God, society, decency, and yes, even the readers' patience at times. It feels like anything can happen, a totally unhindered (unhinged?) imagination.
Possible spoilers in this paragraph:
There's human/shark copulations, a sad monologue by a hair left in a filthy brothel by a murderer, apocalyptic lice breeding and a drunk God getting shat upon. Oh that's nothing, in one scene Maldoror gets so worked up talking about his own intoxicating semen, he insists armies of men will one day slaughter each other en masse just to smell it. Yes. Really.
The unpredictability of it kept me fascinated, it's impossible to tell where this author will go next. One thing is guaranteed -- it will be somewhere in the darker recesses of the human psyche.
But it's not the shocking nature of it I really loved. I've read plenty of shocking tripe. What sticks is the beautiful, evocative prose and the haunting mood it generates. This really feels like something forbidden, and the author seems like he _really_ means it.
I find myself in a mood for surreal and decadent works these days, and this fits the bill, many times over on both counts. This book was so disturbing, it's hard to believe such a thing was published a century and a half ago.
Here's some samples, showing examples of the style.
An image of God:
"Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting--with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen--he who calls himself the Creator! He was holding in his hand the rotten body of a dead man, carrying it in turn from his eyes to his nose and from his nose to his mouth; and once it reached his mouth, one can guess what he did with it."
While watching a ship sink he decides to take this upon himself:
"They could not escape! To make assurance doubly sure, I had gone to fetch my double-barreled rifle so that if some survivor was tempted to approach the rocks of the shore to escape imminent death, a bullet in the shoulder would shatter his arm and prevent him from carrying out his plan."
More raging against God:
"The Eternal One has created the world as it is: He would have been very wise if, in the time strictly necessary to break a woman's skull with hammer-blows, He had forgotten his sidereal majesty for a moment to reveal to us the mysteries amid which our existence stifles like a fish flailing on the ship's deck."
He despises the human voice:
"Oh! when you hear the avalanche of snow falling from the high mountain; the lioness in the barren desert lamenting the disappearance of its cubs; the tempest accomplishing its destined purpose; the condemned man groaning in prison on the eve of his execution; and the savage octopus telling the waves of the sea of his victory over swimmers and the shipwrecked, then you have to acknowledge it: are not these majestic voices finer than the sniggering of men?"
This is something that could only have been written with the anger, testosterone and enthusiasm of youth. He revels in it, letting his imagination go unhindered. There's a few things I wouldn't even quote here they're so shocking. The prose has a poetry to it that is beautiful regardless what he is speaking of. The other thing is, despite it's age, like Beethoven's dissonant "Grosse Fuge", this feels very modern, it's so strange it will likely feel fresh for a long time to come.
There are certainly parts of the book which outshine others. The philosophical rambles can be baffling and feel rather aimless. The first "book" (of six) isn't quite as good as the later ones, although it has it's moments. And finally, I have no doubt this isn't to everyone's taste, but I loved it. As he starts off, "It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."
Read
January 27, 2017I don't know what the F*** I just read.
The most cohesive part of the book was the last Cantos, but that's not saying much.
Think of the most obscene, nonsensical and/or violent scenario in your mind and it's probably in this book. Make your crazy ass scenario includes a shark to have sex with, or a beetle pushing a giant ball of shit up a hill, or a gigantic crab ready to fight you in the name of God. Throw in some murder, lots of shit talking about the Creator, vivid descriptions of vaginas, every immoral act you can think of and that's this book. It has basically everything (is that a good thing? honestly I don't know), and it's at times written quite evocatively, and other times it was... something else.
I've wanted to read this book for a few years now, and now that I read it, I just feel like... well, that was interesting. I'm not sure who I would recommend this book to - probably only people who like transgressive art.
I will give props to the author, whoever the hell he is, because he has one vibrant imagination. I can't imagine this book went over too well when it was printed. I'm honestly surprised he wasn't killed for the blasphemy alone. He died before he was 25 years old, I have no idea what happened to him and as far as we know this was the only thing he wrote.
PS: I don't think it's fair to give a rating on this edition of the book because I did not read this edition. I started to, and then the library copy had to be returned and either the library got rid of the copy or someone stole it. So I found another version of the book -- of which only 1000 copies were made! -- and started over.
The most cohesive part of the book was the last Cantos, but that's not saying much.
Think of the most obscene, nonsensical and/or violent scenario in your mind and it's probably in this book. Make your crazy ass scenario includes a shark to have sex with, or a beetle pushing a giant ball of shit up a hill, or a gigantic crab ready to fight you in the name of God. Throw in some murder, lots of shit talking about the Creator, vivid descriptions of vaginas, every immoral act you can think of and that's this book. It has basically everything (is that a good thing? honestly I don't know), and it's at times written quite evocatively, and other times it was... something else.
I've wanted to read this book for a few years now, and now that I read it, I just feel like... well, that was interesting. I'm not sure who I would recommend this book to - probably only people who like transgressive art.
I will give props to the author, whoever the hell he is, because he has one vibrant imagination. I can't imagine this book went over too well when it was printed. I'm honestly surprised he wasn't killed for the blasphemy alone. He died before he was 25 years old, I have no idea what happened to him and as far as we know this was the only thing he wrote.
PS: I don't think it's fair to give a rating on this edition of the book because I did not read this edition. I started to, and then the library copy had to be returned and either the library got rid of the copy or someone stole it. So I found another version of the book -- of which only 1000 copies were made! -- and started over.
May 23, 2018
Complete and utter beautiful madness. Let your logic and reason soar high and fly away like cranes in the late summer skies. The diary, accounts, thoughts, feelings, and rantings of evil incarnate, of the enemy of man and god. Maldoror reads like nothing before or since, vivid descriptions of vile, baseless acts of depravity and violence, inconceivable logic and strange desires to get closer to human thought and feeling at the same time as one is deeply revulsed by them.
Lautrèmont’s prose is searing, contradictory and alluring, it invokes the grandeur of nature and the darkest malevolence of humanity in such a way that leaves me breathless. This is what it feels like to be taken hostage by a piece of fiction.
“Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting – with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen – he who calls himself the Creator.”
Maldoror, liar, prophet, turns his gaze towards true reason and philosophy and rips it to shreds. Majestic, ghastly, envious, and gracious, the envy of nature burns brightly within Maldoror as he sees himself as the embodiment of man’s sin against itself, and the harbinger of enlightenment.
Malicious and subversive, beautiful and haunting the work of Lautrèamont is complete and utter beautiful madness. Man, savor these somber and poison-filled pages, and never look back.
Lautrèmont’s prose is searing, contradictory and alluring, it invokes the grandeur of nature and the darkest malevolence of humanity in such a way that leaves me breathless. This is what it feels like to be taken hostage by a piece of fiction.
“Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting – with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen – he who calls himself the Creator.”
Maldoror, liar, prophet, turns his gaze towards true reason and philosophy and rips it to shreds. Majestic, ghastly, envious, and gracious, the envy of nature burns brightly within Maldoror as he sees himself as the embodiment of man’s sin against itself, and the harbinger of enlightenment.
Malicious and subversive, beautiful and haunting the work of Lautrèamont is complete and utter beautiful madness. Man, savor these somber and poison-filled pages, and never look back.
August 31, 2014
Ingredients: Victorian obsession with cataloging flora and fowl using proper names that nobody knows or cares about, overuse of the exclamation point on a level that rivals the text messages of a 12-year-old girl, the forced use of strong verbs that are barely strong enough to support bloated sentences festooned with superfluous adjectives and illogical metaphors stretched so beyond any real relationship they seem foolish, a complete lack of narratorial voice that makes the text a disengaging mess of shifting viewpoint, and finally a hodgepodge monster frankensteined together using every gothic trope along with a childish attempt at shocking gore and sensationalism that comes across uninspired and false.
I do not generally write reviews, but the money and time I lost reading this book inspired me to try and save others the same fate. This is the work of a fabricating novice mimicking the works of others and peppering it with just enough disingenuous vulgarity to try and make a name for himself. I am certain the longevity of this book is owed to the early death of the author and ample opportunity for hack scholars to make crude guesses at some tenuous meaning. There is nothing new here. It has a message as deep as middle school poetry or three inches of muddy water.
I do not generally write reviews, but the money and time I lost reading this book inspired me to try and save others the same fate. This is the work of a fabricating novice mimicking the works of others and peppering it with just enough disingenuous vulgarity to try and make a name for himself. I am certain the longevity of this book is owed to the early death of the author and ample opportunity for hack scholars to make crude guesses at some tenuous meaning. There is nothing new here. It has a message as deep as middle school poetry or three inches of muddy water.
March 1, 2015
This is a very peculiar book for review because one can approach it from two perspectives - its 'importance' in literature and whether it is actually worth reading. It is like the Bible in that respect - the sort of blasphemous implication that Isidore Ducasse (the actual author) might have appeared to revel in.
Let us start with a first proposition - that it is 'important'. Yes, Maldoror is important if you are a specialist or interested in French literature and at two levels. It is both a stepping stone from the Gothick (with Maldoror containing many of Gothick's traditional tropes) over the stream of decadence to surrealism with its famous phrase in the seminal Book Six referring to the "chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!" and a first step to the self-knowing French literary meme of literature as a thing that refers to itself.
The addition of the so-called Poems to this edition is important because they change our reception to Maldoror simply by being read alongside them. Maldoror might be read as a sincere rage against God and Man filled with brutality and evil if we did not see the author in the Poems assert in a series of cynical platitudes the exact opposite point of view in the Poems.
This tricksiness continues with the titling and style - the Poems are just sets of often pompous rhetorical aphorisms, often contradictory, while Maldoror, ostensibly presented as a novel (though only the Sixth Book comes close to being a coherent narrative) is really a large number of prose poems but connected only through the Mathurin-like character of Maldoror (though even this is never clear).
Ducasse is undoubtedly a possible literary genius but since he died at the age of 24 (his life is almost incredibly obscure to the extent that one is suspicious of his very existence though it is indeed evidenced) we cannot confirm any claim to this effect. My own interpretation is that we have a very intelligent and possibly obsessive young man playing with the literature of his time in order to expose its and our absurdities through exposing the rhetorical positions it and we take.
Without the cynico-beneficent platitudes of the associated Poems, left to take Maldoror at face value, we might fall into the trap of taking his essay in evil so seriously as to dismiss him as a very clever, possibly insane, adolescent but the whole is too well crafted for that, including the very clever pastiching of the pompous declamatory styles of the era and of late romanticism as a whole.
The litanisation of literary figures of the first two thirds of the French (and European) nineteenth century in the Poems, many of whom are now forgotten, makes them of their time and place. It tells us one of the few things we 'know' about this body of work - it is literary work about literature that tells us nothing of life and is conscious of that position.
Those who have just read Maldoror and taken it as another 'set text' of 'evil, be thou my good' are missing the point that they are the subjects of the satire themselves - for satire it is.
But what of our second proposition - is it worth reading? Well, unless you are a student of European literary culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably not.
The Poems certainly are only interesting in that context and as counterpoint to Maldoror but they are what they are designed to be - two long sets of platitudes being declaimed by a pompous fool (not, of course, Ducasse as Ducasse but Ducasse as player of pompous fools).
Maldoror has its moments where a page or passage grips but its incoherence and self-referencing as well as its internal debate with a late romanticism that is no longer an 'issue' for us today is mostly rather dull while the type of evil it offers is no longer persuasive to a world of scientific precision in our understanding of the inadequacy of serial and child killers.
The book is set in a specific mental milieu - that of the problem of God and evil in a believing age where many intellectuals were not believers or were forced into believing positions by politics or the market. This question is now only of interest to theologians and historians and not to the intelligent general observer in an advanced Western culture which can more safely take this God-thing out of the political equation and just consider how banal the evil that men do is when looked at more closely. This age needs no rhetoric, pomposity, complex sentences and epic similes. Milton did this definitively and better and everything else is just a foot-note to his Satan.
If you want to avoid being bogged down in the grand scheme (some 200 pages in this edition) and are prepared to miss out on the one or two real gems in the flow of rhetorical mud, you can just jump to the 'novel' itself in Book Six and kill two birds with one stone - get a sense of the cruel wit of Ducasse at the expense of his contemporaries and some understanding of his influence on the surrealists where the section cries out for Max Ernst's collages to illustrate it.
So, all in all, an important book in its context but a rather dull one not because Ducasse is a dull or bad writer (he is not) but because he is contesting things and ideas with an almost brutal intensity that are not really going to be of much interest to us or our age.
September 22, 2026
"I’ll establish in a few lines how Maldoror was good in his early years when he lived a happy life. There, that’s done."
Yep, Maldoror is certainly an interesting character. He never trims his fingernails. He hasn't slept in 30 years. He likes to collect and breed lice. He falls in love with a shark. He argues with a man with the head of a pelican and tears the heart from a dragon. He can change into the shape of a giant octopus or a vicious eagle. He brutally murders a man as easily as he revives another who drowned himself in the Seine. He may be the embodiment of evil, or he may only exist in a psychotic mind.
Maldoror is the creation of Isidore Ducasse, a young 19th Century writer who went by the pen name of the Comte de Lautréamont and posthumously became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. For anyone who appreciates avant-garde art, you have this book to thank.
Goodreaders who've come across my reviews before may know that I am a big fan of horror film and literature, French Symbolism, psychoanalysis, and Industrial music. All of these movements are indebted to Maldoror, and hopefully, by briefly explaining how, I will give you a framework with which to most enjoy this weird little book that may at first seem shapeless and pointless.
Though originally published in 1869, the book didn't make much splash until rediscovered by various fin-de-siècle avant-garde circles. The Symbolists and Decadents adored how Maldoror unclogged his nose and farted in the general direction of bourgeois morality. In the titular character, Symbolists like Remy de Gourmont and Alfred Jarry found an antihero who boldly went where no one had gone before, exploring the depths of taboo and sin. The Symbolists considered Ducasse a poète maudit (cursed poet), and were inspired mostly by his dark and macabre themes that paired well with ether and absinthe. In other words, it was Ducasse's aesthetics, atmosphere, and imagery that moved the Symbolists. A typical example is the image of Maldoror on his dreary bed, propping his eyelids open with splinters to prevent him from dosing off, because it is when the mind is open to the universe that one is open to receive the Creator. Maldoror is always on guard in his battle against God.
Dadaism and Surrealism, on the other hand, were more interested in the language and structure of this unique prose poem rather than the dark themes. Dadaists like André Breton rejected Symbolism's embrace of Maldoror as "art," seeing it as more of an anti-novel that demolished conventional literary form and logic. The book can be read as prose, but has the spirit of poetry. It is a written work that must be read with the eyes, but has the quality of something to which we'd listen. Perspective changes from first to third person seemlessly, and we are not sure if Maldoror is perhaps speaking to us or about us, if he is a character or the author, or if he is the figment of an author's imagination or the unreliable and psychotic author himself. Ducasse is attempting to close the seemingly irreconcilable gap between object and subject, and this mobilizes the mind to think differently about the boundaries of individual and to see the diversity of phenomena as a perhaps not so distinct and actually part of something cosmically greater.
Breton would carry his love for this book into his philosophy behind the subsequent Surrealist movement. Breton would point to the passage in the 6th book of "Maldoror" where Ducasse describes the handsome features of the character Mervyn "as the chance juxtaposition on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella." Breton considered this the quintessential example of how surrealist language can work to move an audience. Indeed, there is a beauty to this phrase that comes from the juxtaposition of completely unrelated concepts to understand a new truth. The Surrealists took this idea to the next level, encouraging artists to write whatever came to mind regardless of any readily apparent logical connection. This kind of "automatic writing" was criticized as a form of divination, as mediums would often use the technique for communication with the afterlife. Just like Maldoror thought sleep would leave the mind open to God, popular wisdom feared that malevolent entities could speak through automatic writing. Ironically, being open to receiving and discussing the dream imagery of sleep and a spoken form of automatic writing called "free association" became the basis for Freud's psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious. The dream logic and free-flowing composition of "Maldoror" is a literal psychoanalysis of the author, and even of the reader.
Then there's what we call Industrial music. Now, when I refer to "industrial" music, I am not referring to the forms of electronic dance and metal music that gained popularity in the 1990s with seminal projects like Ministry, Front 242, Nine Inch Nails, and Skinny Puppy. Yes, that's all called "industrial," but it is sort of like calling "post-punk" punk. What people commonly think of as industrial music today is a spectrum of subgenres that developed from an older artform also known as industrial, an experimental avant-garde improv made from DIY electronics, found objects, and conventional instruments played in unconventional ways. Along with the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, "Les Chants de Maldoror" is the foundational text of industrial music, largely inherited from the Dadaist and Surrealist points of view. The Dada idea of "Maldoror" being the first anti-novel carried forward to industrial as being "anti-music," shunning conventional musical forms just as Ducasse did with literature. From the Surrealist side, industrial music tries to tap into the unconscious via a composition technique that is improvisational. I don't mean "jam sessions" and semi-improvised solos like in some forms of jazz or psychedelic rock. I mean full-on sonic freedom. Industrial was trying to capture lightning in a bottle, moments of expanded awareness through truths expressed in unique sounds created by the "chance meeting" of free flowing performances and independent play between "sound sculptors" that embraced the discordant as well as the harmonious.
When reading "Maldoror," I think it will enhance your enjoyment to experience it as you would music. Your favorite track may not make complete narrative sense, and it may not even have lyrics at all, but it speaks to you. Similarly, if you ever have been in a state of "Flow," where you are so open to creative energies that it seems the story you are writing is writing itself, the picture you are painting is taking shape on its own, or your musical instrument is playing you, then you understand the kind of headspace Ducasse was in when he wrote this.
However, don't assume this book is a tossed salad of disjointed, loosely associated words. If it were, I wouldn't recommend this at all. Rather, this comes across as beautifully written prose poetry with some surreal elements that you don't have to think about too hard. By the time you finish it, you feel you've actually read a complete story, but you didn't. The magic lies in how Ducasse's use of language is so evocative that it combs through your unconscious to bring out your own unique sequence of emotions.
Ducasse's use of language is not just for shock value or to razzledazzle the audience with pseudo-intellectual mumbojumbo. He teaches us that, just as science tries to uncover truths not apparent to our limited senses, so does poetry and symbol reveal possibilities that we can't fathom through the limitations of language. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was so fascinated by the language used in "Maldoror" that he wrote an entire book about it, arguing that Ducasse's poetry was revealing something fundamental about the nature of evil. He believed there is an innate drive for unprovoked aggression in the universe because it is the basis of transformative change. It is what makes animals evolve into new shapes and sizes, and the same applies down to the quantum level, where particles behave like waves. This is why the "Chants" have two repeated themes:
1) Maldoror constantly references and interacts with animals from the tiniest insect to the largest mammals. To be exact, Bachelard reports 185 distinct species. Yes, believe it or not, somebody counted! But Maldoror doesn't just interact with animals. He talks to them in a way that indicates a deep understanding of their qualia ("what it is like" to be that animal), and even becomes animals. The animal is usually depicted amidst a violent act that is divorced from the necessity to feed or defend itself. Thus, Maldoror is either "intellectually" challenging the animal from the inside, which often is catalytic to some kind of violent change, or experiencing what it is like for that organism to undergo metamorphosis. This is a hard thing to convey in conventional language, but Bachelard compares "Maldoror" with other literary attempts to tackle the same themes, like Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Wells's "The Island of Dr. Moreau." I would argue that "The Thing" and other body horrors deserve consideration in this respect. Overall, I think it helps to keep some of this in mind when reading many of these passages involving animal behavior, anthropomorphic animals, or shape-shifting.
2) When Maldoror murders or provokes, the violence is written in such a way as to always catch the reader off guard. There is an explosive and impulsive quality to his writing. This is partially why early industrial music did try to recreate this experience with unpredictable and explosive sonic forces, with soothing drones and repetitive electronic loops suddenly disintegrating into heavy distortion and chaotic dissonance. If you think about transformation as violence, it is often the most unexpected and sudden traumas that bring about the most lasting change. Also with biologic change comes death. The caterpillar becomes a chrysalis before a butterfly. So, with the idea of evil comes change and death. If "with the beginning was the Word," and if life is the word, then it makes poetic sense for Maldoror's use of words to be chaotic, even meaningless. For you D&D fans, he is the embodiment of chaotic evil.
Finally, we come to the undeniable influence of this book on the horror genre. Not only does Maldoror employ a lot of gothic imagery, but it has some of the most brutal and gory content outside of an Ed Lee novel. There are some moments in this book which can be triggering for some readers. One section immediately comes to mind that involves a little girl and a bulldog that is particularly gruesome and harrowing. Only crack this book open if you feel you can handle the surprises that suddenly jump out of nowhere. If you can go with the flow, I suspect you will otherwise find most of this book outrageously creative and delightful.
And before you assume that Ducasse was just a sicko living out his darkest fantasies in a book about the embodiment of evil, his intent was to counter it with a sequel which focused on the good. This would make sense. If "Maldoror" was a poetic experiment to understand evil as a natural creative force, as I've suggested here, then the next step would be to explore the role of the good, of attraction rather than repulsion, of love rather than hatred, of what is eternal rather than what is always violently changing. Ducasse does seem to have been heading towards a dialectic, and it would have been fascinating. Unfortunately, Ducasse died very young before he could complete this second volume, though what he did finish is also included in most publications under the title "Poésies" or "Poems." Don't skip that part.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that to understand "Les Chants de Maldoror" is to understand a lot about my artistic interests, and thus what makes me tick. I certainly feel I understand myself better after reading this. But ironically, I don't understand this book at all, at least not in the logical sense. Nobody does, because there is no clear linear narrative. It can only be EXPERIENCED. If you appreciate how art makes you feel through its own unique language, then you will "get" this book, much like a film by David Lynch or Lucio Fulci requires an openness to experience, and maybe even a little practice. Truth always just seems so irrational, and this is where experimentation comes in--experimental art can change the optics of your experience. Or you could follow Maldoror's own advice:
"The most soothing potion I can suggest is a bowl full of granular and blennorhagic pus in which the following will previously have been dissolved: a hairy cyst from the ovary, a follicular chancre, an inflamed foreskin turned back from the gland by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. If you follow my prescription, my poetry will welcome you with open arms..."
My own experience with Maldoror is even more strange in that I've never picked up this book without the weather suddenly turning fussy. I started reading this in July, and, every time, the thunder and pelting rain would start providing ambience outside. I put it down for a month because I had to do some research for some classes I teach. Not a single drop of rain that whole time. As soon as I picked it up again, I heard a boom outside, and the lightning began again. Coincidence? Or Maldoror?
You couldn't ask for a more disturbing, a more thoughtful, or a more beautiful book to settle into this Spooky Season. Give it a try!
SCORE: 5 flying octopi out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Fulguration
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRINGS:
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979) by Nurse with Wound
Bar Maldoror (1985) by Current 93
Live at Bar Maldoror (1991) by Nurse with Wound
Yep, Maldoror is certainly an interesting character. He never trims his fingernails. He hasn't slept in 30 years. He likes to collect and breed lice. He falls in love with a shark. He argues with a man with the head of a pelican and tears the heart from a dragon. He can change into the shape of a giant octopus or a vicious eagle. He brutally murders a man as easily as he revives another who drowned himself in the Seine. He may be the embodiment of evil, or he may only exist in a psychotic mind.
Maldoror is the creation of Isidore Ducasse, a young 19th Century writer who went by the pen name of the Comte de Lautréamont and posthumously became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. For anyone who appreciates avant-garde art, you have this book to thank.
Goodreaders who've come across my reviews before may know that I am a big fan of horror film and literature, French Symbolism, psychoanalysis, and Industrial music. All of these movements are indebted to Maldoror, and hopefully, by briefly explaining how, I will give you a framework with which to most enjoy this weird little book that may at first seem shapeless and pointless.
Though originally published in 1869, the book didn't make much splash until rediscovered by various fin-de-siècle avant-garde circles. The Symbolists and Decadents adored how Maldoror unclogged his nose and farted in the general direction of bourgeois morality. In the titular character, Symbolists like Remy de Gourmont and Alfred Jarry found an antihero who boldly went where no one had gone before, exploring the depths of taboo and sin. The Symbolists considered Ducasse a poète maudit (cursed poet), and were inspired mostly by his dark and macabre themes that paired well with ether and absinthe. In other words, it was Ducasse's aesthetics, atmosphere, and imagery that moved the Symbolists. A typical example is the image of Maldoror on his dreary bed, propping his eyelids open with splinters to prevent him from dosing off, because it is when the mind is open to the universe that one is open to receive the Creator. Maldoror is always on guard in his battle against God.
Dadaism and Surrealism, on the other hand, were more interested in the language and structure of this unique prose poem rather than the dark themes. Dadaists like André Breton rejected Symbolism's embrace of Maldoror as "art," seeing it as more of an anti-novel that demolished conventional literary form and logic. The book can be read as prose, but has the spirit of poetry. It is a written work that must be read with the eyes, but has the quality of something to which we'd listen. Perspective changes from first to third person seemlessly, and we are not sure if Maldoror is perhaps speaking to us or about us, if he is a character or the author, or if he is the figment of an author's imagination or the unreliable and psychotic author himself. Ducasse is attempting to close the seemingly irreconcilable gap between object and subject, and this mobilizes the mind to think differently about the boundaries of individual and to see the diversity of phenomena as a perhaps not so distinct and actually part of something cosmically greater.
Breton would carry his love for this book into his philosophy behind the subsequent Surrealist movement. Breton would point to the passage in the 6th book of "Maldoror" where Ducasse describes the handsome features of the character Mervyn "as the chance juxtaposition on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella." Breton considered this the quintessential example of how surrealist language can work to move an audience. Indeed, there is a beauty to this phrase that comes from the juxtaposition of completely unrelated concepts to understand a new truth. The Surrealists took this idea to the next level, encouraging artists to write whatever came to mind regardless of any readily apparent logical connection. This kind of "automatic writing" was criticized as a form of divination, as mediums would often use the technique for communication with the afterlife. Just like Maldoror thought sleep would leave the mind open to God, popular wisdom feared that malevolent entities could speak through automatic writing. Ironically, being open to receiving and discussing the dream imagery of sleep and a spoken form of automatic writing called "free association" became the basis for Freud's psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious. The dream logic and free-flowing composition of "Maldoror" is a literal psychoanalysis of the author, and even of the reader.
Then there's what we call Industrial music. Now, when I refer to "industrial" music, I am not referring to the forms of electronic dance and metal music that gained popularity in the 1990s with seminal projects like Ministry, Front 242, Nine Inch Nails, and Skinny Puppy. Yes, that's all called "industrial," but it is sort of like calling "post-punk" punk. What people commonly think of as industrial music today is a spectrum of subgenres that developed from an older artform also known as industrial, an experimental avant-garde improv made from DIY electronics, found objects, and conventional instruments played in unconventional ways. Along with the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, "Les Chants de Maldoror" is the foundational text of industrial music, largely inherited from the Dadaist and Surrealist points of view. The Dada idea of "Maldoror" being the first anti-novel carried forward to industrial as being "anti-music," shunning conventional musical forms just as Ducasse did with literature. From the Surrealist side, industrial music tries to tap into the unconscious via a composition technique that is improvisational. I don't mean "jam sessions" and semi-improvised solos like in some forms of jazz or psychedelic rock. I mean full-on sonic freedom. Industrial was trying to capture lightning in a bottle, moments of expanded awareness through truths expressed in unique sounds created by the "chance meeting" of free flowing performances and independent play between "sound sculptors" that embraced the discordant as well as the harmonious.
When reading "Maldoror," I think it will enhance your enjoyment to experience it as you would music. Your favorite track may not make complete narrative sense, and it may not even have lyrics at all, but it speaks to you. Similarly, if you ever have been in a state of "Flow," where you are so open to creative energies that it seems the story you are writing is writing itself, the picture you are painting is taking shape on its own, or your musical instrument is playing you, then you understand the kind of headspace Ducasse was in when he wrote this.
However, don't assume this book is a tossed salad of disjointed, loosely associated words. If it were, I wouldn't recommend this at all. Rather, this comes across as beautifully written prose poetry with some surreal elements that you don't have to think about too hard. By the time you finish it, you feel you've actually read a complete story, but you didn't. The magic lies in how Ducasse's use of language is so evocative that it combs through your unconscious to bring out your own unique sequence of emotions.
Ducasse's use of language is not just for shock value or to razzledazzle the audience with pseudo-intellectual mumbojumbo. He teaches us that, just as science tries to uncover truths not apparent to our limited senses, so does poetry and symbol reveal possibilities that we can't fathom through the limitations of language. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was so fascinated by the language used in "Maldoror" that he wrote an entire book about it, arguing that Ducasse's poetry was revealing something fundamental about the nature of evil. He believed there is an innate drive for unprovoked aggression in the universe because it is the basis of transformative change. It is what makes animals evolve into new shapes and sizes, and the same applies down to the quantum level, where particles behave like waves. This is why the "Chants" have two repeated themes:
1) Maldoror constantly references and interacts with animals from the tiniest insect to the largest mammals. To be exact, Bachelard reports 185 distinct species. Yes, believe it or not, somebody counted! But Maldoror doesn't just interact with animals. He talks to them in a way that indicates a deep understanding of their qualia ("what it is like" to be that animal), and even becomes animals. The animal is usually depicted amidst a violent act that is divorced from the necessity to feed or defend itself. Thus, Maldoror is either "intellectually" challenging the animal from the inside, which often is catalytic to some kind of violent change, or experiencing what it is like for that organism to undergo metamorphosis. This is a hard thing to convey in conventional language, but Bachelard compares "Maldoror" with other literary attempts to tackle the same themes, like Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Wells's "The Island of Dr. Moreau." I would argue that "The Thing" and other body horrors deserve consideration in this respect. Overall, I think it helps to keep some of this in mind when reading many of these passages involving animal behavior, anthropomorphic animals, or shape-shifting.
2) When Maldoror murders or provokes, the violence is written in such a way as to always catch the reader off guard. There is an explosive and impulsive quality to his writing. This is partially why early industrial music did try to recreate this experience with unpredictable and explosive sonic forces, with soothing drones and repetitive electronic loops suddenly disintegrating into heavy distortion and chaotic dissonance. If you think about transformation as violence, it is often the most unexpected and sudden traumas that bring about the most lasting change. Also with biologic change comes death. The caterpillar becomes a chrysalis before a butterfly. So, with the idea of evil comes change and death. If "with the beginning was the Word," and if life is the word, then it makes poetic sense for Maldoror's use of words to be chaotic, even meaningless. For you D&D fans, he is the embodiment of chaotic evil.
Finally, we come to the undeniable influence of this book on the horror genre. Not only does Maldoror employ a lot of gothic imagery, but it has some of the most brutal and gory content outside of an Ed Lee novel. There are some moments in this book which can be triggering for some readers. One section immediately comes to mind that involves a little girl and a bulldog that is particularly gruesome and harrowing. Only crack this book open if you feel you can handle the surprises that suddenly jump out of nowhere. If you can go with the flow, I suspect you will otherwise find most of this book outrageously creative and delightful.
And before you assume that Ducasse was just a sicko living out his darkest fantasies in a book about the embodiment of evil, his intent was to counter it with a sequel which focused on the good. This would make sense. If "Maldoror" was a poetic experiment to understand evil as a natural creative force, as I've suggested here, then the next step would be to explore the role of the good, of attraction rather than repulsion, of love rather than hatred, of what is eternal rather than what is always violently changing. Ducasse does seem to have been heading towards a dialectic, and it would have been fascinating. Unfortunately, Ducasse died very young before he could complete this second volume, though what he did finish is also included in most publications under the title "Poésies" or "Poems." Don't skip that part.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that to understand "Les Chants de Maldoror" is to understand a lot about my artistic interests, and thus what makes me tick. I certainly feel I understand myself better after reading this. But ironically, I don't understand this book at all, at least not in the logical sense. Nobody does, because there is no clear linear narrative. It can only be EXPERIENCED. If you appreciate how art makes you feel through its own unique language, then you will "get" this book, much like a film by David Lynch or Lucio Fulci requires an openness to experience, and maybe even a little practice. Truth always just seems so irrational, and this is where experimentation comes in--experimental art can change the optics of your experience. Or you could follow Maldoror's own advice:
"The most soothing potion I can suggest is a bowl full of granular and blennorhagic pus in which the following will previously have been dissolved: a hairy cyst from the ovary, a follicular chancre, an inflamed foreskin turned back from the gland by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. If you follow my prescription, my poetry will welcome you with open arms..."
My own experience with Maldoror is even more strange in that I've never picked up this book without the weather suddenly turning fussy. I started reading this in July, and, every time, the thunder and pelting rain would start providing ambience outside. I put it down for a month because I had to do some research for some classes I teach. Not a single drop of rain that whole time. As soon as I picked it up again, I heard a boom outside, and the lightning began again. Coincidence? Or Maldoror?
You couldn't ask for a more disturbing, a more thoughtful, or a more beautiful book to settle into this Spooky Season. Give it a try!
SCORE: 5 flying octopi out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Fulguration
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRINGS:
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979) by Nurse with Wound
Bar Maldoror (1985) by Current 93
Live at Bar Maldoror (1991) by Nurse with Wound
October 14, 2025
Isidore Ducasse, better known as Comte de Lautréamonte, wrote a surreal horror nightmare amalgamation known as Les Chants de Maldoror. In plenty of ways it is beyond description. In the ways it is not, I can make some attempt at characterizing it but without capturing a fraction of its intricacy and burning, swimming, flowing, inverted perversity and chaos.
It isn’t a novel with a story or a plot-driven narrative. It’s structured like personal memoirs reflecting on a life of hatred and violence and poetry and inward contemplation zeroed in on destroying human life, or celebrating the ways in which the fall of civilization might come, or a sexual holocaust could blossom from innocence. He not only defies gods but declares war against God, even Satan, against everything. But this is too simplifying — it goes from first to second to third person and back again, sometimes changing because of vague suggestions of dialogue — but with whom? The reader, I suppose. And the mood is not always so nihilistic, it sometimes turns to humorous, morose, adoring, contemplative, loving, and is always scaling the peaks of imaginative pan-dimensional infinity while ripping apart the fabric of consciousness and morality and sense. Things of mundane familiarity transform in the most sublime ways into things alien and distant and tortuous and doomed. Not just physical things, but ideas, feelings, knowledge, narrative itself, everything warps in a way that follows a strangely logical course if you look just right.
Surreal it is, but beyond our normal conception of surrealism’s guardrails, with violence and sadism and blasphemous darkness and eroticism growing within. It is sexual and sadistic and mindful of decency while upending it and playing with every vision or concept to float by. It is misanthropic and poetic and so brilliantly composed in a way that its prose takes a psychological pick-axe to the universe. The mile long stretches of unconstrained genius that occur so frequently throughout the book are too many and too great to summarize or do justice. Despite having the energy and whimsical free association often seen in stream-of-consciousness splurges, this feels coherent, magical, a prose-dagger constantly stabbing and slicing and twisting in the guts of some literary ether. I loved every minute of the thing.
Lice are heralded as the great destroyer of man. Maldoror fornicates with a female louse for three nights, then buries her deep underground where she spawns a colony of louse who feed on one another, eating each other and reproducing into a large cube of lice that can be dug up, broken to pieces, and these pieces buried in cities to spread and take over and bring an end to humanity. I fail to capture the grandeur of his true vision, but this gives a hint. Nuns awaken from deep in the catacombs and form a funeral circle around a tortured youth who will ascend into the sky on wings hidden under a robe.
A spider rises up from its hole each night to crawl slowly over to the sleeping victim, to suck on his blood, to whisper in his ear, to feed endlessly on the helpless man. We are instructed to, if we wish to properly understand our hero’s poetry, eat our own mothers unless they are too decrepit and old — otherwise a young girl will do, because her bones will be just right. There is much life and essence and energy to be found in so many unexpected things here, whether the bones of the young or in the screams of pain from the specially chosen, or the sexual gratification of the slave, or a song from beyond the grave, or blasphemous animalistic madness of shapeless state, bestiality, murder, brutality, and cruelty. It’s all here!
Despite how grim it sounds the book is a wonder, a marvel, a peerless achievement that cannot be described or reviewed helpfully. Any attempt underserves it, undersells it, does not come close to conveying what it is.
Included in this edition is a much shorter work entitled Poems, though it is not poetry. Here, Lautréamont, if we took him as a faithful narrator who was transcribing all his deepest and truest thoughts in Maldoror, appears to contradict that entire work by presenting many alternative points of view and conflicting sentiments here. But one must carry that unfounded assumption first to find themselves so perplexed, as it seems many literary critics did and do. I don’t understand why. Poems is a scathing criticism, analysis, and observation of poetry, of philosophers, scientists, artists, historians, morals, values, and many of the very concepts he twisted and opened up and transformed in Maldoror. There is no reason in Poems to assume that this work is any more a reflection of the true beliefs of its author than Maldoror, or that either work reflect his true self. If either did, we could be sure to observe him from a safe distance and not look away. In these two works he has crafted a masterwork that has seen nothing quite like them in the century and a half since their appearance.
It isn’t a novel with a story or a plot-driven narrative. It’s structured like personal memoirs reflecting on a life of hatred and violence and poetry and inward contemplation zeroed in on destroying human life, or celebrating the ways in which the fall of civilization might come, or a sexual holocaust could blossom from innocence. He not only defies gods but declares war against God, even Satan, against everything. But this is too simplifying — it goes from first to second to third person and back again, sometimes changing because of vague suggestions of dialogue — but with whom? The reader, I suppose. And the mood is not always so nihilistic, it sometimes turns to humorous, morose, adoring, contemplative, loving, and is always scaling the peaks of imaginative pan-dimensional infinity while ripping apart the fabric of consciousness and morality and sense. Things of mundane familiarity transform in the most sublime ways into things alien and distant and tortuous and doomed. Not just physical things, but ideas, feelings, knowledge, narrative itself, everything warps in a way that follows a strangely logical course if you look just right.
Surreal it is, but beyond our normal conception of surrealism’s guardrails, with violence and sadism and blasphemous darkness and eroticism growing within. It is sexual and sadistic and mindful of decency while upending it and playing with every vision or concept to float by. It is misanthropic and poetic and so brilliantly composed in a way that its prose takes a psychological pick-axe to the universe. The mile long stretches of unconstrained genius that occur so frequently throughout the book are too many and too great to summarize or do justice. Despite having the energy and whimsical free association often seen in stream-of-consciousness splurges, this feels coherent, magical, a prose-dagger constantly stabbing and slicing and twisting in the guts of some literary ether. I loved every minute of the thing.
Lice are heralded as the great destroyer of man. Maldoror fornicates with a female louse for three nights, then buries her deep underground where she spawns a colony of louse who feed on one another, eating each other and reproducing into a large cube of lice that can be dug up, broken to pieces, and these pieces buried in cities to spread and take over and bring an end to humanity. I fail to capture the grandeur of his true vision, but this gives a hint. Nuns awaken from deep in the catacombs and form a funeral circle around a tortured youth who will ascend into the sky on wings hidden under a robe.
A spider rises up from its hole each night to crawl slowly over to the sleeping victim, to suck on his blood, to whisper in his ear, to feed endlessly on the helpless man. We are instructed to, if we wish to properly understand our hero’s poetry, eat our own mothers unless they are too decrepit and old — otherwise a young girl will do, because her bones will be just right. There is much life and essence and energy to be found in so many unexpected things here, whether the bones of the young or in the screams of pain from the specially chosen, or the sexual gratification of the slave, or a song from beyond the grave, or blasphemous animalistic madness of shapeless state, bestiality, murder, brutality, and cruelty. It’s all here!
Despite how grim it sounds the book is a wonder, a marvel, a peerless achievement that cannot be described or reviewed helpfully. Any attempt underserves it, undersells it, does not come close to conveying what it is.
Included in this edition is a much shorter work entitled Poems, though it is not poetry. Here, Lautréamont, if we took him as a faithful narrator who was transcribing all his deepest and truest thoughts in Maldoror, appears to contradict that entire work by presenting many alternative points of view and conflicting sentiments here. But one must carry that unfounded assumption first to find themselves so perplexed, as it seems many literary critics did and do. I don’t understand why. Poems is a scathing criticism, analysis, and observation of poetry, of philosophers, scientists, artists, historians, morals, values, and many of the very concepts he twisted and opened up and transformed in Maldoror. There is no reason in Poems to assume that this work is any more a reflection of the true beliefs of its author than Maldoror, or that either work reflect his true self. If either did, we could be sure to observe him from a safe distance and not look away. In these two works he has crafted a masterwork that has seen nothing quite like them in the century and a half since their appearance.
June 8, 2024
برای کشورش که او را از آغوشش بیرون کرده است. او از سرزمینی به سرزمین دیگر میرود، همه جا منفور است. برخی میگویند او از کودکی به نوعی جنون مادرزادی مبتلا بوده است. دیگران ادعا میکنند که او به طور غریزی ظالم است، خودش از این شرمنده است و پدر و مادرش از اندوه آن مردند. عدهای مدعی هستند که در جوانی لقبی خاص داشته است. به خاطر این لقب از آن زمان تاکنون تسلی ناپذیر بوده است، زیرا احساس کرامت جریحه دار او، در حقیقت شاهدی آشکار از شرارت انسان است که در سالهای اولیه زندگی او ظاهر میشود و مدام رشد میکند. لقب او خون آشام بود!
از دور فریادهای طولانی طاقت فرساترین رنجها را میشنوم.
میافزایند که شبانه روز، بدون آسودگی و آرامش، کابوسهای وحشتناک باعث خونریزی از گوش و دهان او میشود؛ و ارواح بر سر تخت او مینشینند و _نیرویی ناشناخته از بغض خودشان، با صداهایی مانند غرش جنگ_ آن لقب نفرت انگیز را مقابل او فریاد میزنند، لقبی که فقط با از بین رفتن هستی از بین خواهد رفت. برخی میگویند عشق او را به این وضعیت رسانده است. یا اینکه گریههای او بیانگر پشیمانی از جنایتی است که مربوط به شبهای مرموز گذشته اوست، اما اکثریت فکر میکنند که او مانند شیطان از غرور بی اندازه شکنجه میشود و میخواهد با خدا برابری کند...
____
لوترهآمون یا درواقع ایزیدور دوکاس شاعری فرانسویست که همراه با مالارمه، رمبو، و ساد احتمالاً تأثیرگذارترین چهرۀ ادبیات مدرن فرانسه است. مجموعه شعرهای منثور او با نام ترانههای مالدورور (۱۸۶۸) بهمثابۀ پیشتاز آثار سوررئالیستها ستایش شد.
از دور فریادهای طولانی طاقت فرساترین رنجها را میشنوم.
میافزایند که شبانه روز، بدون آسودگی و آرامش، کابوسهای وحشتناک باعث خونریزی از گوش و دهان او میشود؛ و ارواح بر سر تخت او مینشینند و _نیرویی ناشناخته از بغض خودشان، با صداهایی مانند غرش جنگ_ آن لقب نفرت انگیز را مقابل او فریاد میزنند، لقبی که فقط با از بین رفتن هستی از بین خواهد رفت. برخی میگویند عشق او را به این وضعیت رسانده است. یا اینکه گریههای او بیانگر پشیمانی از جنایتی است که مربوط به شبهای مرموز گذشته اوست، اما اکثریت فکر میکنند که او مانند شیطان از غرور بی اندازه شکنجه میشود و میخواهد با خدا برابری کند...
____
لوترهآمون یا درواقع ایزیدور دوکاس شاعری فرانسویست که همراه با مالارمه، رمبو، و ساد احتمالاً تأثیرگذارترین چهرۀ ادبیات مدرن فرانسه است. مجموعه شعرهای منثور او با نام ترانههای مالدورور (۱۸۶۸) بهمثابۀ پیشتاز آثار سوررئالیستها ستایش شد.
June 12, 2019
Certainly has its bloody moments !
November 25, 2025
I started reading this a few months ago, because I have been getting deep into Gothic literature, and also since I've started a Goth Rock band, I have been wanting to songwrite, so I figured why not read anything that is recommended to me for doing that. I was told to read Lautréamonts Maldoror, because it is so damn dark, it flows poetically and I was told it could be inspirational for writing songs. I picked it up and started reading it alongside another book, until after I finished Crime and Punishment and decided to finish the rest of it.
This book is good; Maldoror, the main character definitely has tendencies that remind me of a modern serial killer; it's almost like you can see flashes of good or desire for goodness in him, but he's so evil. Masochistic, delirious, perverted, and definitely atheistic, critical of the idea of god or of religion in any way. But, I'll be honest, as I went past the first half of the book, the writing sometimes confused me, and I had to reread lines and I felt like I didn't get what was being said.
That being said, I enjoyed it, I definitely got some ideas for some lyrics, and I definitely would recommend this to anyone who is in the goth subculture to read it, and anyone who likes the horror or crime genres.
This book is good; Maldoror, the main character definitely has tendencies that remind me of a modern serial killer; it's almost like you can see flashes of good or desire for goodness in him, but he's so evil. Masochistic, delirious, perverted, and definitely atheistic, critical of the idea of god or of religion in any way. But, I'll be honest, as I went past the first half of the book, the writing sometimes confused me, and I had to reread lines and I felt like I didn't get what was being said.
That being said, I enjoyed it, I definitely got some ideas for some lyrics, and I definitely would recommend this to anyone who is in the goth subculture to read it, and anyone who likes the horror or crime genres.
Read
March 27, 2026freaky vibes !
July 19, 2010
Wow! This is a great book, though not flawless. The author starts by warning the reader to turn back if he hasn't the stomach for what follows...of course that just draws you in, as intended.
As soon as you start reading it you can see why the surrealists loved it. There's a constant stream of imagery that is by turns gothic, sacrilegious, violent, repulsive, funny, blasphemous etc. Some of the imagery just stick in your brain like the the toads that live in Maldoror's (left) armpit and the crab that has taken up residence in his anus; watching sailors from a sinking ship drown and be attacked by sharks. Maldoror then has sex with a female shark; A man hanging by his hair and being whipped by two ugly women; the joy from digging his long fingernails into a baby's chest; the Creator lying in a drunken stupor in a ditch.
The imagery is extreme and the style is completely over the top but it is precisely this that makes it an astonishing read. It has to be read slowly and in small installments to try to take it all in, though I am guilty of rushing parts of it. This book will certainly require repeated readings... in fact I have already started re-reading different sections - it is easy to just dip into random chapters as there is little connection between successive chapters.
The downside is that I find with this type of book the lack of plot or some sort of over-riding structure can just get a bit boring. The lack of characters and any sort of progression can make the process of reading it seem a bit pointless as well. The constant parade of violence and brutality may be a bit wearing at times - similar to reading de Sade for example.
However if you're intrigued by a book that could have been written by H.P. Lovecraft whilst on a bad LSD trip then give this one a go!
As soon as you start reading it you can see why the surrealists loved it. There's a constant stream of imagery that is by turns gothic, sacrilegious, violent, repulsive, funny, blasphemous etc. Some of the imagery just stick in your brain like the the toads that live in Maldoror's (left) armpit and the crab that has taken up residence in his anus; watching sailors from a sinking ship drown and be attacked by sharks. Maldoror then has sex with a female shark; A man hanging by his hair and being whipped by two ugly women; the joy from digging his long fingernails into a baby's chest; the Creator lying in a drunken stupor in a ditch.
The imagery is extreme and the style is completely over the top but it is precisely this that makes it an astonishing read. It has to be read slowly and in small installments to try to take it all in, though I am guilty of rushing parts of it. This book will certainly require repeated readings... in fact I have already started re-reading different sections - it is easy to just dip into random chapters as there is little connection between successive chapters.
The downside is that I find with this type of book the lack of plot or some sort of over-riding structure can just get a bit boring. The lack of characters and any sort of progression can make the process of reading it seem a bit pointless as well. The constant parade of violence and brutality may be a bit wearing at times - similar to reading de Sade for example.
However if you're intrigued by a book that could have been written by H.P. Lovecraft whilst on a bad LSD trip then give this one a go!
November 14, 2025
why the hell did he write those maxim poems, what the fuck man 😭. fuck a shark sure. have a single strand of God’s hair recount his bloody and debauched night at a convent brothel… but i draw the line at moral maxims!
August 20, 2011
This is a surreal, gothic, poetic, brutal, imaginative, unreadable non-story of a book written in 1868 by 22 year old Isidore Ducasse who died 2 years later.
It is based around the narrator's real life and imagined alter ego Maldoror. He describes what he sees and produces a darkly, sinister, interaction from them whilst at the same time the narrator tells us what Maldoror sees and does. Maldoror loathes himself, God, life, everyone else's life and his situation. The book is actually six mini-books of 10 sections. Though a lot deeper than the list will suggest this is a summary of the first few books main ideas or initial trains of thought:
Pederast, oceans, murder, gravedigger, toad, blood, bus passengers, small girl, hermaphrodite, soprano, louse, maths, lamp, Almighty, shipwreck, suicide, shark, conscience, horse rider, child rape/body mutilation, madwoman, dragon, sleeping god, brothel, a hair, hanged, body, shadow, dreamy hog, aqua man, teenager, dung beetle, funeral, vampire spider.
Maldoror kills, hates, imagines, thinks, torments, asks the reader, and engages you with the situation he's conjured up. The depth comes because it's not real but is believable. But is clever and thought provoking. Teenagers get their throats cut, a hair starts talking, mathematics is exalted and God denied. Maldoror himself says he's trying to "invent a poetry completely outside the laws of nature" and the text is just that. There is about 10% story particularly the last book but don't expect to understand or have any resolution.
Maldoror's a sort of average teenager goth armed with a pen, virginal hang-ups, demonic ideas, handbook of world religions and writes what he sees.
Here are some more quotes but even these don't really do the work justice:
"whenever he kissed a little pink-faced child, he felt like tearing open its cheeks with a razor"
"I use my genius to depict the delights of cruelty"
"show me a man who is good...for at the sight of such a monster, I may die of astonishment: men have died of less"
"drink, drink confidently the blood and tears of the adolescent. Blindfold him, while you rend his palpitating flesh"
"It is not enough that the army of physical and moral afflictions which surrounds us should have been created: the secret of our shabby destiny is not revealed to us"
"he prepares, without blenching, to dig his knife courageously into the unfortunate child's vagina. From the widen hole he pulls out, one after one, the inner organs.
"While the cold wind whistled through the firs, the Creator opened his doors in the darkness and showed a pederast in"
Ultimately you'll enjoy reading this as it's so different but don't expect a happy or even an ending at all. I like a story and because ultimately it's difficult to recall much (because it's so dense) by thened, I'll drop a star.
It is based around the narrator's real life and imagined alter ego Maldoror. He describes what he sees and produces a darkly, sinister, interaction from them whilst at the same time the narrator tells us what Maldoror sees and does. Maldoror loathes himself, God, life, everyone else's life and his situation. The book is actually six mini-books of 10 sections. Though a lot deeper than the list will suggest this is a summary of the first few books main ideas or initial trains of thought:
Pederast, oceans, murder, gravedigger, toad, blood, bus passengers, small girl, hermaphrodite, soprano, louse, maths, lamp, Almighty, shipwreck, suicide, shark, conscience, horse rider, child rape/body mutilation, madwoman, dragon, sleeping god, brothel, a hair, hanged, body, shadow, dreamy hog, aqua man, teenager, dung beetle, funeral, vampire spider.
Maldoror kills, hates, imagines, thinks, torments, asks the reader, and engages you with the situation he's conjured up. The depth comes because it's not real but is believable. But is clever and thought provoking. Teenagers get their throats cut, a hair starts talking, mathematics is exalted and God denied. Maldoror himself says he's trying to "invent a poetry completely outside the laws of nature" and the text is just that. There is about 10% story particularly the last book but don't expect to understand or have any resolution.
Maldoror's a sort of average teenager goth armed with a pen, virginal hang-ups, demonic ideas, handbook of world religions and writes what he sees.
Here are some more quotes but even these don't really do the work justice:
"whenever he kissed a little pink-faced child, he felt like tearing open its cheeks with a razor"
"I use my genius to depict the delights of cruelty"
"show me a man who is good...for at the sight of such a monster, I may die of astonishment: men have died of less"
"drink, drink confidently the blood and tears of the adolescent. Blindfold him, while you rend his palpitating flesh"
"It is not enough that the army of physical and moral afflictions which surrounds us should have been created: the secret of our shabby destiny is not revealed to us"
"he prepares, without blenching, to dig his knife courageously into the unfortunate child's vagina. From the widen hole he pulls out, one after one, the inner organs.
"While the cold wind whistled through the firs, the Creator opened his doors in the darkness and showed a pederast in"
Ultimately you'll enjoy reading this as it's so different but don't expect a happy or even an ending at all. I like a story and because ultimately it's difficult to recall much (because it's so dense) by thened, I'll drop a star.
October 14, 2020
Maldoror is a horrible and malicious piece of venom directed against humanity at large. The Poems are some of the most graceful and insightful words ever arranged. Ducasse never managed to adequately complete the diptych, but the ambition is still pretty impressive. Writing about evil in order to remind the reader how much they crave the good is a worthy goal, and the way he writes about evil is by any standard groundbreaking. The issue is that Maldoror feels way ahead of its time and the Poems are thoroughly classical, so it is rare to find readers inclined to appreciate both aesthetics simultaneously. This raises a tricky question: what aesthetic best suits evil, what aesthetic best suits good, and is it an issue if they are in tension? Ducasse's lesson, as I read him, is that evil is contemporary whereas the good more or less stays the same.
Personally, while I appreciate the daring surrealism of Maldoror I find it a bit frustrating. The issue with practically inventing (along with writers like Dostoevsky) the modern figure of the whiny nihilist is that one must read through a lot of whining. I have spent multiple sleepless nights wishing Ducasse had lived to write his paradiso properly. Two volumes were published in his lifetime, but one wonders whether his reflections on the good might have been further developed if he hadn't died at the ripe old age of 24. I subtract one star for the occasional tastelessness in Maldoror and one for the infuriatingly fragmentary nature of the Poems.
It is easily one of the most interesting creative projects in history, and someone should really finish it.
Personally, while I appreciate the daring surrealism of Maldoror I find it a bit frustrating. The issue with practically inventing (along with writers like Dostoevsky) the modern figure of the whiny nihilist is that one must read through a lot of whining. I have spent multiple sleepless nights wishing Ducasse had lived to write his paradiso properly. Two volumes were published in his lifetime, but one wonders whether his reflections on the good might have been further developed if he hadn't died at the ripe old age of 24. I subtract one star for the occasional tastelessness in Maldoror and one for the infuriatingly fragmentary nature of the Poems.
It is easily one of the most interesting creative projects in history, and someone should really finish it.
July 27, 2011
Superb. Puts me in mind of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, William Burroughs, the Sandman comic series and the Jerry Cornelius books by Michael Moorcock. Having been disappointed by some perverse literature recently (Naked Lunch, Thief's Journal) I thought I perhaps couldn't enjoy this kind of thing any more, but Maldoror proved me wrong. Really striking imagery and some really fresh prose thoroughly impressed me. It's like the Naked Lunch that's actually good. It should really have a much wider readership. Images like God sitting on a throne made out of gold and shit eating human beings he is plucking from a cauldron of boiling blood, or Maldoror watching a ship sink and then fucking a female shark that has just taken part in a feeding frenzy amongst the survivors really made me realise i've been reading too much bourgeois literature recently. Read it, read it, read it, read it. Read it.
January 10, 2008
This book contains some of the longest sentences I have ever read and make it worthwhile to wander through their intricate pathways to discover what oddments Isidore Ducasse has hidden at the end -- or maybe the time spent lost in tangents, those wonderful and maligned (yet always compelling, like a distant scent of maple on the air that shouldn't be there, but impossible, strangely *is*, and admits of no rational explanation ready at hand) glimpses into the hidden rooms of creativity that are open to the eyes of anyone who is willing to stop for a moment and let themselves go inside, is what makes the long excursion to the end of the sentences seem somehow, in a kind of teenage-crush way, important.
Read
February 20, 2022Dug up as an inspiration for the surrealists of the early 20th Century despite being written in the 1860s.
Filled with all sorts of scatological, murderous, God-hating, raping, tortorous images and themes that would have likely been very counter-culture for the mid-19th century. Weird that we now live in an age where many of the gross scenarios Lautreamont builds don't even seem that shocking ... just another Art student of the late 20th and early 21st century.
The work is written in the form of various vignettes in the amoral travels of one 'Maldoror', some are better than others and near the end I was getting a tad bored and just began to flick through. The vignettes I did enjoy were usually the ones that involved animals, they seem to be stand-ins for beings that do not subscribe to a human value system ... Especially liked the episodes involving Sharks which to me seem like a great animal to use when you want to write metaphorically about viciousness and murder, one of my fav band names is 'Feed Her to the Sharks'!
Would love to know more about the actual author of Maldoror, Lautreamont (the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He died so young at only 24 and was apparently a student from Uruguay ... Was he simply a lonely student writer of Monparnasse or did he frequent any literary circles of the time? His writing seems obviously to build off of Baudelaire's dark themes (Fleur du Mal written 1857), and would love to know if he was part of any Paris mileu of the time or just a fanboy of the Great French writer.
Oh I should add that this edition als has Lautreamont's 'Poems' as well (he published these later), this is apparently the 'good' counterpart to all the evil spewed out in Maldoror, I didn't find them too interesting though ... Stick to the Evil Maldoror, much more interesting.
Filled with all sorts of scatological, murderous, God-hating, raping, tortorous images and themes that would have likely been very counter-culture for the mid-19th century. Weird that we now live in an age where many of the gross scenarios Lautreamont builds don't even seem that shocking ... just another Art student of the late 20th and early 21st century.
The work is written in the form of various vignettes in the amoral travels of one 'Maldoror', some are better than others and near the end I was getting a tad bored and just began to flick through. The vignettes I did enjoy were usually the ones that involved animals, they seem to be stand-ins for beings that do not subscribe to a human value system ... Especially liked the episodes involving Sharks which to me seem like a great animal to use when you want to write metaphorically about viciousness and murder, one of my fav band names is 'Feed Her to the Sharks'!
Would love to know more about the actual author of Maldoror, Lautreamont (the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He died so young at only 24 and was apparently a student from Uruguay ... Was he simply a lonely student writer of Monparnasse or did he frequent any literary circles of the time? His writing seems obviously to build off of Baudelaire's dark themes (Fleur du Mal written 1857), and would love to know if he was part of any Paris mileu of the time or just a fanboy of the Great French writer.
Oh I should add that this edition als has Lautreamont's 'Poems' as well (he published these later), this is apparently the 'good' counterpart to all the evil spewed out in Maldoror, I didn't find them too interesting though ... Stick to the Evil Maldoror, much more interesting.
November 11, 2024
One of the most lyrically beautiful and horrific things I have yet to come across. Maldoror is an absolute masterpiece of awful proportion. The poems are, I think, of little note, at least in relation Maldoror.
Concerning Maldoror:
Do not read this book. On the very first page the narrator makes the same warning.
Maybe you should read it, but proceed with caution.
The depth of evil between these pages is dumbfounding. It feels like a book one would find in the restricted section at Hogwarts.
Do not read this book in the morning; it will ruin the rest of your day. There were times when I read it before class and I would have to stop and just sit, stewing in disgust for half an hour.
Ducasse is a genius. I am still trying to fathom how something so horrid could at the same time be so profoundly beautiful.
Even with its vileness, it is a testament to the depths and expanse of the human mind. It is both bizarre and ethereal, beguiling and repugnant, or, as Maldoror describes the beauty of a young boy, it is like ‘the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’.
One of the greatest works I have read (was going to say ‘have had the pleasure to read’ but could not call this experience that).
Concerning Maldoror:
Do not read this book. On the very first page the narrator makes the same warning.
Maybe you should read it, but proceed with caution.
The depth of evil between these pages is dumbfounding. It feels like a book one would find in the restricted section at Hogwarts.
Do not read this book in the morning; it will ruin the rest of your day. There were times when I read it before class and I would have to stop and just sit, stewing in disgust for half an hour.
Ducasse is a genius. I am still trying to fathom how something so horrid could at the same time be so profoundly beautiful.
Even with its vileness, it is a testament to the depths and expanse of the human mind. It is both bizarre and ethereal, beguiling and repugnant, or, as Maldoror describes the beauty of a young boy, it is like ‘the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’.
One of the greatest works I have read (was going to say ‘have had the pleasure to read’ but could not call this experience that).
Displaying 1 - 30 of 116 reviews