What do you think?
Rate this book
Dan Yack #1
Dan Yack
Dan Yack commence comme une parabole et s’achève comme un lamento : Le Plan de l’Aiguille et Les Confessions de Dan Yack furent d’abord publiés séparément avant d’être réunis par Blaise Cendrars. Ce livre de dissonances vire sans cesse du burlesque au tragique, de la violence au rire, du drame à la pantomime. Quand à Dan Yack, ce milliardaire anglais au nom bizarre, il échappe à la saisie. D’abord présenté à la manière de Charlot, il ressurgit sous les traits d’un héros en proie au mal du siècle. Dans le tourbillon des aventures qui l’emportent à travers le monde, une question pourtant ne le quitte pas : est-il possible de changer sa vie ? Et à quel prix ? Dan Yack reste le plus secret des grands romans de Blaise Cendrars, celui qui touche au plus brûlant, au plus intime.
415 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1929
1 person is currently reading
279 people want to read
About the author
Blaise Cendrars
274 books276 followersFrédéric Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.
His father, an inventor-businessman, was Swiss, his mother Scottish. He spent his childhood in Alexandria, Naples, Brindisi, Neuchâtel, and numerous other places, while accompanying his father, who endlessly pursued business schemes, none successfully.
At the age of fifteen, Cendrars left home to travel in Russia, Persia, China while working as a jewel merchant; several years later, he wrote about this in his poem, Transiberien. He was in Paris before 1910, where he got in touch with several names of Paris' bélle époque: Guillaume Apollinaire, Modigliani, Marc Chagall and many more. Cendrars then traveled to America, where he wrote his first long poem Pâques à New-York. The next year appeared The Transsibérien.
When he came back to France, I World War was started and he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915. During the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm. He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée.
After the war he returned to Paris, becaming an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse. There, among others, used to meet with other writers such as Henry Miller, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
During the 1920's he published two long novels, Moravagine and Les Confessions de Dan Yack. Into the 1930’s published a number of “novelized” biographies or volumes of extravagant reporting, such as L’Or, based on the life of John August Sutter, and Rhum, “reportage romance” dealing with the life and trials of Jean Galmont, a misfired Cecil Rhodes of Guiana.
La Belle Epoque was the great age of discovery in arts and letters. Cendrars, very much of the epoch, was sketched by Caruso, painted by Léon Bakst, by Léger, by Modigliani, by Chagall; and in his turn helped discover Negro art, jazz, and the modern music of Les Six. His home base was always Paris, for several years in the Rue de Savoie, later, for many years, in the Avenue Montaigne, and in the country, his little house at Tremblay-sur Mauldre (Seine-et-Oise), though he continued to travel extensively. He worked for a short while in Hollywood in 1936, at the time of the filming of Sutter’s Gold. From 1924 to 1936, went so constantly to South America. This life globertrottering life was pictured in his book Bourlinguer, published in 1948.
Another remarkable works apparead in the 40s were L’Homme Foudroyé (1945), La Main Coupée (1946), Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949), that constitute his best and most important work. His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop.
==========
Sources:
- http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_...
His father, an inventor-businessman, was Swiss, his mother Scottish. He spent his childhood in Alexandria, Naples, Brindisi, Neuchâtel, and numerous other places, while accompanying his father, who endlessly pursued business schemes, none successfully.
At the age of fifteen, Cendrars left home to travel in Russia, Persia, China while working as a jewel merchant; several years later, he wrote about this in his poem, Transiberien. He was in Paris before 1910, where he got in touch with several names of Paris' bélle époque: Guillaume Apollinaire, Modigliani, Marc Chagall and many more. Cendrars then traveled to America, where he wrote his first long poem Pâques à New-York. The next year appeared The Transsibérien.
When he came back to France, I World War was started and he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915. During the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm. He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée.
After the war he returned to Paris, becaming an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse. There, among others, used to meet with other writers such as Henry Miller, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
During the 1920's he published two long novels, Moravagine and Les Confessions de Dan Yack. Into the 1930’s published a number of “novelized” biographies or volumes of extravagant reporting, such as L’Or, based on the life of John August Sutter, and Rhum, “reportage romance” dealing with the life and trials of Jean Galmont, a misfired Cecil Rhodes of Guiana.
La Belle Epoque was the great age of discovery in arts and letters. Cendrars, very much of the epoch, was sketched by Caruso, painted by Léon Bakst, by Léger, by Modigliani, by Chagall; and in his turn helped discover Negro art, jazz, and the modern music of Les Six. His home base was always Paris, for several years in the Rue de Savoie, later, for many years, in the Avenue Montaigne, and in the country, his little house at Tremblay-sur Mauldre (Seine-et-Oise), though he continued to travel extensively. He worked for a short while in Hollywood in 1936, at the time of the filming of Sutter’s Gold. From 1924 to 1936, went so constantly to South America. This life globertrottering life was pictured in his book Bourlinguer, published in 1948.
Another remarkable works apparead in the 40s were L’Homme Foudroyé (1945), La Main Coupée (1946), Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949), that constitute his best and most important work. His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop.
==========
Sources:
- http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
March 3, 2025
In the same tradition of madcap, zeitgeist-capturing, end-of-millennium swashbucklers as (insert your picks here ________), the first Dan Yack novel is, hands-down, a first-ballot hall of famer. Moron Saint Dan Yack is a protean Slothrop—rich, lionhearted, dumb as bread—looking for his own Chums of Chance to mix within the great dust-up at the end of the world. Huge swatches of historical junkstuffs are sewn together pell-mell, resulting in yet another (to pretentiously crowbar L. Cohen’s [maybe] best album in) new skin for the old ceremony to reflect back to us how absolutely fucked it all worked out. We missed out on all the thrill, inheriting only the terror of free fall that is Life in the MMM CE. Absolute sonsabitches!
Pretty much perfect for what it is and its place within Cendrars’ oeuvre; this last is revealing itself to be one of the better literary long-games ever played out over decades.
Pretty much perfect for what it is and its place within Cendrars’ oeuvre; this last is revealing itself to be one of the better literary long-games ever played out over decades.
February 1, 2013
'But me no buts, we're going to make whoopee, I tell you.'
And tell us he does as if James Ensor read Rabelais (he did), sailed to the Antarctic to lead a parade out of one of his paintings and Abel Gance filmed it. Many times I read a book that pleases me greatly and when tasked with writing a review I wonder who exactly who might be the audience for the work at hand. Mostly I write reviews so my children will know what their father was thinking so I might live on in their minds a bit after I die. Pathos – pathos indeed. But there are times when I read something so invigorating that my focus changes to finding a way to make sure that whoever reads the review is interested in sharing the experience. I’d like to have friends that could chat about Cendrars with me. If that’s too sappy for you – I don’t really care, nor did Cendrars seemingly when he unleashed Dan Yack on the world.
While reading Dan Yack I often had the image of Jack Black’s role in King Kong in my head as impossible circumstances only embolden the great adventurer in spite of massive tragedy, suffering and looming failure. An absolute verbal picnic is what’s in store for those willing to brave the tundra with Dan Yack. I do not have a reading knowledge of French but I enjoyed each word of this translation from Nina Rootes and although I’ll never rival an Intuit’s verbal dexterity in describing ice and snow – I’ve gained an intimate understating of such conditions due to Cendrars’ amazing descriptive skill. Word lovers will rejoice in the sheer volume of new words you'll learn and if you think you're past such revelations due to the fact you're already a really well-read person - you at least probably have never heard of a guesquel and such things are nice to know about at times. Those familiar with Jarry’s Faustroll will find something familiar in this bizarre piquaresque style that clearly originates from the father of all literary brilliance – Rabelais. For example:
Combs of wood
Tortoise shell
And polished horn
Split sleepers’ eyes before the dawn.
Gaiter-straps
And ten-league boots
Made from hide of pigs
Cross mountains, buns and periwigs!
And reach a happy land
A mile above the sun
Were kids play quoits with millstones
While a corporal and three soldiers beat the sun with
giants' bones.
Panatgruelist friends and lovers of pathos will be unable to leave this book without the glow of beauty still illuminating their paths as it’s not only the verbal depth of Dan Yack that radiates crystaline light. The depth of thought in Dan Yack is compelling. Shut yourself out in the cold for a while with a dog and lots of booze and you won’t be thinking about petty things for long. Art, music, poetry and epicurean lust for indulgence are all richly displayed with intelligence and a glorious lack of restraint. Cendrars was an intimate of Abel Gance (do not pass another day without seeing La Roue if possible) and the book reads like a film as Cendrars words do the work of an amazing cinematographer in describing the landscape, characters and events that comprise Dan Yack.
Did you giggle and weep through the Gold Rush? If so read Dan Yack on a cold winter day, so cold that not lowering your ushanka’s ear flaps is not only a crime of vanity but a willful display of disrespect against nature. When Yack floats in a direction set only by the will of an ice-float I was unable to keep the image of the narwhal waving Buddy the Elf goodbye as he made his way into the city to learn who he really is.
If my life goes as planned I’ll have the time to return to this book on regular intervals. Fawn fawn fawn. Dan Yack goes on the top shelf.
And tell us he does as if James Ensor read Rabelais (he did), sailed to the Antarctic to lead a parade out of one of his paintings and Abel Gance filmed it. Many times I read a book that pleases me greatly and when tasked with writing a review I wonder who exactly who might be the audience for the work at hand. Mostly I write reviews so my children will know what their father was thinking so I might live on in their minds a bit after I die. Pathos – pathos indeed. But there are times when I read something so invigorating that my focus changes to finding a way to make sure that whoever reads the review is interested in sharing the experience. I’d like to have friends that could chat about Cendrars with me. If that’s too sappy for you – I don’t really care, nor did Cendrars seemingly when he unleashed Dan Yack on the world.
While reading Dan Yack I often had the image of Jack Black’s role in King Kong in my head as impossible circumstances only embolden the great adventurer in spite of massive tragedy, suffering and looming failure. An absolute verbal picnic is what’s in store for those willing to brave the tundra with Dan Yack. I do not have a reading knowledge of French but I enjoyed each word of this translation from Nina Rootes and although I’ll never rival an Intuit’s verbal dexterity in describing ice and snow – I’ve gained an intimate understating of such conditions due to Cendrars’ amazing descriptive skill. Word lovers will rejoice in the sheer volume of new words you'll learn and if you think you're past such revelations due to the fact you're already a really well-read person - you at least probably have never heard of a guesquel and such things are nice to know about at times. Those familiar with Jarry’s Faustroll will find something familiar in this bizarre piquaresque style that clearly originates from the father of all literary brilliance – Rabelais. For example:
Combs of wood
Tortoise shell
And polished horn
Split sleepers’ eyes before the dawn.
Gaiter-straps
And ten-league boots
Made from hide of pigs
Cross mountains, buns and periwigs!
And reach a happy land
A mile above the sun
Were kids play quoits with millstones
While a corporal and three soldiers beat the sun with
giants' bones.
Panatgruelist friends and lovers of pathos will be unable to leave this book without the glow of beauty still illuminating their paths as it’s not only the verbal depth of Dan Yack that radiates crystaline light. The depth of thought in Dan Yack is compelling. Shut yourself out in the cold for a while with a dog and lots of booze and you won’t be thinking about petty things for long. Art, music, poetry and epicurean lust for indulgence are all richly displayed with intelligence and a glorious lack of restraint. Cendrars was an intimate of Abel Gance (do not pass another day without seeing La Roue if possible) and the book reads like a film as Cendrars words do the work of an amazing cinematographer in describing the landscape, characters and events that comprise Dan Yack.
Did you giggle and weep through the Gold Rush? If so read Dan Yack on a cold winter day, so cold that not lowering your ushanka’s ear flaps is not only a crime of vanity but a willful display of disrespect against nature. When Yack floats in a direction set only by the will of an ice-float I was unable to keep the image of the narwhal waving Buddy the Elf goodbye as he made his way into the city to learn who he really is.
If my life goes as planned I’ll have the time to return to this book on regular intervals. Fawn fawn fawn. Dan Yack goes on the top shelf.
Read
January 28, 2012Oh, the French, the French, the French. Blaise Cendrars might as well be wearing a stripy shirt and sighing between Gauloises on a side street in Montmartre, making care not to get his mustache in his café au lait. If you like Jacques Tati or Raymond Queneau, you'll like Blaise Cendrars. If you would have preferred to have spent your life sipping brandy with a sultan, a sea captain, and a courtesan, you'll like Blaise Cendrars. If you regularly drop the phrase "ceci n'est pas une pipe" into regular conversation, you'll like Blaise Cendrars. All of these things apply to me, so it follows that I liked Blaise Cendrars.
Dan Yack is lost among the wastrels of Saint Petersburg before setting off onto a voyage to the Antarctic involving noses being cut off, whale meat, Patagonian whores, shipwrecks, and ice sculptures. At this point, you are either attracted or repelled. Your call.
Dan Yack is lost among the wastrels of Saint Petersburg before setting off onto a voyage to the Antarctic involving noses being cut off, whale meat, Patagonian whores, shipwrecks, and ice sculptures. At this point, you are either attracted or repelled. Your call.
Read
October 2, 2020Fantastic & unclassifiable. A work of startling originality & audacious force.
June 1, 2023
Gritty and flamboyant writing. At times, awe-inspiring. Hallucinogenic. Kaleidoscopic. Muscular. However, the scattiness and battiness of the characters (including Dan Yack) began to grate. Then came the whaling malarkey in Part 5 . . . phuff. - I think that injures the book for the modern reader.
June 9, 2024
A truly remarkable novel, originally published in 1927 as *Le Plan de l'Aiguille* but not translated into English for another 60 years. Dan Yack is an impetuous, generally drunk, clever but eccentric shipping magnate. When his girlfriend leaves him, he goes on a drinking spree in St Petersburg and impulsively invites three impoverished bohemians sitting at a cafe table, a painter, musician and sculptor, to accompany him on a voyage to a random location that will be determined by aiming a pistol at a large globe of the world and seeing where the bullet strikes. They end up on an island off the coast of Antarctica...
The bohemians slowly go mad in different ways. Dan Yack eventually escapes to Chiloé where among other things he learns the use of the guesquel, an object that is “...cet instrument dont les Indiens patagons se servent pour faire jouir leurs femmes.” I’ll say no more about that... Cendrars was a rare genius and his work is dreamlike, feverish, very strange and yet precise. I can’t recommend *Dan Yack* highly enough!
The bohemians slowly go mad in different ways. Dan Yack eventually escapes to Chiloé where among other things he learns the use of the guesquel, an object that is “...cet instrument dont les Indiens patagons se servent pour faire jouir leurs femmes.” I’ll say no more about that... Cendrars was a rare genius and his work is dreamlike, feverish, very strange and yet precise. I can’t recommend *Dan Yack* highly enough!
November 27, 2020
Dan Yack is described as an eccentric English millionaire shipowner, a notorious hell-raiser and the envy of all St Petersburg.
And that he is also the alter ego of his creator, Blaise Cendrars (Frederic-Louis Sauser) who was an old friend of Henry Miller’s from the Paris days (which is what brought me to Cendrars).
Now, when I read that the protagonist is the alter ego of the author and said protagonist is extremely eccentric, I tend to wonder about the author.
But since the term alter ego can mean several different things, like a twin, best friend or the complete opposite, who knows?
I will say that while reading this I came upon what is now my new all-time favorite name for a bar.
It was in South America and the name was Pourquoi Pepita? Which translated in French and Spanish means, Why Pumpkin Seed?
To sum it all up, it was quite an adventure, not one I would care to take, but Dan Yack had the time of his life.
And that he is also the alter ego of his creator, Blaise Cendrars (Frederic-Louis Sauser) who was an old friend of Henry Miller’s from the Paris days (which is what brought me to Cendrars).
Now, when I read that the protagonist is the alter ego of the author and said protagonist is extremely eccentric, I tend to wonder about the author.
But since the term alter ego can mean several different things, like a twin, best friend or the complete opposite, who knows?
I will say that while reading this I came upon what is now my new all-time favorite name for a bar.
It was in South America and the name was Pourquoi Pepita? Which translated in French and Spanish means, Why Pumpkin Seed?
To sum it all up, it was quite an adventure, not one I would care to take, but Dan Yack had the time of his life.
March 17, 2009
I loved Moravagine and finally got the chance to read another Blaise Cendrars book.
Dan Yack is a damn good book with really thrilling and pyrotechnic writing, passages, and plot. Occasionally Cendrars goes a little over-the-top with his writing, but it's always readable and always great. The plot is wild; not as wild as Moravagine, but still a crazy adventure following Dan Yack, a ultra-rich lovable asshole with a black heart of gold, who goes from Russia to the arctic to the Chile, drunk and wild the entire time, leaving a wake of damage behind him.
Worth a look if you like literary pulp.
Dan Yack is a damn good book with really thrilling and pyrotechnic writing, passages, and plot. Occasionally Cendrars goes a little over-the-top with his writing, but it's always readable and always great. The plot is wild; not as wild as Moravagine, but still a crazy adventure following Dan Yack, a ultra-rich lovable asshole with a black heart of gold, who goes from Russia to the arctic to the Chile, drunk and wild the entire time, leaving a wake of damage behind him.
Worth a look if you like literary pulp.
September 26, 2007
A Nooks McShea recommendation. Not mind blowing like The Tenants of Moonbloom, but a good read with some amazing segments. A rich man who was just jilted by his girlfriend goes on a drunk and asks three artists to join him, all expenses paid, on a trip to the Antarctica. Strange cataclysmic events unfold.
July 6, 2016
For a review of this book, along with Gold and Confessions of Dan Yack, check out Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews:
http://www.zero-books.net/books/centr...
http://www.zero-books.net/books/centr...
January 19, 2019
Cendrars writes the best 2- and 3-star books in the world. They're propulsive (at times), anti-intellectual, full of incredible sentences that suggest a consciousness with the "self-" thoroughly removed from the front. The great crime is that they are travesties of composition and that they become tedious even when they clock in under 150 pages. It is also incredible that he manages to fill such slender volumes with such prodigious amounts of racism and misogyny. There is a point where Dan Yack nears the end of explaining a grand plan that takes up pages of dialogue and then loses interest in it by the time he's about to close the deal. You can tell that that's how Cendrars feels about his books. I'll do him the honor of feeling the same way about reading them. Last one.
May 4, 2025
completely mad, unfiltered, inspired, grotesque and bighearted
September 10, 2025
It took a while but once I entered the world of Dan Yack, I did not regret it one bit.
January 7, 2013
Literary modernism included an broad array of different authorial styles, each writer breaking new ground. One of those writers whose style resonates well for this reader is Blaise Cendrars. His novel Dan Yack can be described: "The style is bizarre, full of paradoxes and piquant and ingenious ideas." Thus one of Dan Yack's acquaintances describes a curious book of poetry and in so doing provides an apt description of Cendrars' novel. Every page presents anomalies, curiosities, phrases whose bizarre irrationality gradually becomes the reader's expectation. The opening scene includes champagne corks and witnesses Dan Yack in a drunken spree where the "gilt rods that held the rec carpet in place stabbed his brain"(p 10). The adventures of Yack with three artists, poet and musician and sculptor, on his schooner to Antarctica provide entertainment enough for the reader of this slight tome.
Reality continually merges with hallucinatory moments and the rush that the characters live provides delight for the reader. I am not sure why I find Cendrars' absurdities both humorous and appealing. They remind me of my own dreams and Cendrars said of himself: "I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies—even that of writing." (from an Interview in the Paris Review)
Dan Yack is a gem--short, sweet, and bizarre.
Reality continually merges with hallucinatory moments and the rush that the characters live provides delight for the reader. I am not sure why I find Cendrars' absurdities both humorous and appealing. They remind me of my own dreams and Cendrars said of himself: "I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies—even that of writing." (from an Interview in the Paris Review)
Dan Yack is a gem--short, sweet, and bizarre.
March 12, 2013
Hooray for Dan Yack, a turn of the century Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Dan Yack is the young millionaire "all of St. Petersburg is talking about" - just spurned by a woman (for "the" prince) - that invites a poet, a sculptor, and a composer around the world on one of the whaling boats he has inherited.
Everyone ends up wintering (summering?) off the coast of Antarctica where Dan Yack loses his monocle and madness preys on his guests.
The writing can be incendiary, humorous, and a straight view of the absurd reality of life.
Dan Yack is the young millionaire "all of St. Petersburg is talking about" - just spurned by a woman (for "the" prince) - that invites a poet, a sculptor, and a composer around the world on one of the whaling boats he has inherited.
Everyone ends up wintering (summering?) off the coast of Antarctica where Dan Yack loses his monocle and madness preys on his guests.
The writing can be incendiary, humorous, and a straight view of the absurd reality of life.
January 14, 2018
extraordinary and unpredictable swirling riot of madness, violence and excess. Cendrars' prose is informed by his exotic life with a perspective at once savage, kind, world weary, appreciative and inspired. total head trip
January 28, 2009
The greatest book ever written by a dude with one arm.
April 29, 2013
Astounding book. Beautiful and crazy and Modernist and intelligent and profound.
My full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/?p=2553
My full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/?p=2553
April 6, 2013
It's Cendrars. Need I write more? Expect discordant travels, steam boat millionaires, swirled n twirled mustaches, and the finer points of attending the Great War.
July 22, 2009
As good or better than Morvagine. No one writes like Cendrars. Incredible.
May 1, 2015
"He clung to the rock like a limpet"!
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews