Pravin Vavhal Vavhal itibaren Kenilworth QLD 4574, Avustralya
Pretty good. Not as good as 'On Love.' Some parts better than others.
I love Agatha Christie, but I didn't like this book as much as I liked some of her other ones (although I still thought it was great). I think it's because it was one of her first books and she was still honing her craft a bit.
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.
The plot of this didn't grip me as intensely as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but what this lacked in plot interests to me, it made up for in the beauty of his prose. I read this in the days where I was underlining passages that I wanted to remember, and I think there's something underlined on each page.