Jarry, Modigliani, Verlaine and others hailed it as a work of genius. The writer’s mysterious life and death, no less than the book itself, captured the imagination of surrealists. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace, and the startling imagery – delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns – possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, Lautréamont’s fantasy unveils a world – half-vision, half-nightmare – of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children. So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70) at the beginning of this sensational Chants de Maldoror. ‘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.’
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