Volume 32, Number 1 · January 31, 1985
Scientist of the Fantastic
By Luc Sante
Impressions of Africa
by Raymond Roussel, translated by Lindy Foord, by Rayner Heppenstall
John Calder/Riverrun Press, 317 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Locus Solus
by Raymond Roussel, translated by Rupert Copeland Cunningham
John Calder/Riverrun Press, 254 pp., $9.95 (paper)
How I Wrote Certain of My Books d'Afrique by Kenneth Koch
by Raymond Roussel, translated, with notes and a bibliography, by Trevor Winkfield, with two essays on Roussel by John Ashbery, a translation of Canto III of Nouvelles Impressions
SUN, 75 pp., $7.00 (paper)
Raymond Roussel
by Rayner Heppenstall
John Calder/Riverrun Press, 97 pp., $12.95
In the annals of twentieth-century literature, few cases are as strange as that of Raymond Roussel. In the first place, so little is really known about his life that all kinds of things can easily be imagined. More important is the dizzying succession of paradoxes concerning his work: he was the most prosaic of poets, the most literal-minded of phantasts. His prose is so clear that it requires decoding. He could generate so many stories that his books have no progression. He was a literary conservative who was claimed by nearly every succeeding avant-garde in France. He strove all his life to write popular literature, in both senses of the term, only to end up in a limbo of notorious, even chic, obscurity, being much alluded to but seldom read.
Review, 3902 words
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