Louis Aragon Books

I noticed that this is coming back into print in November 2002, so I figured I'd write this review. If you are a fan of Matisse, you should snap up this book. It is an awesome achievement by Mr. Schneider. There is a tremendous amount of biographical data here, as well as a wealth of reproductions- both color and black and white. One caveat, though. This is definitely not for the casual reader! There is a lot of detailed analysis of the paintings included- such things as Matisse's theories on the use of color and shape; the tremendous amount of work and thought that went into each work in order to create color harmony and a balance of all the pictorial elements, etc. Mr. Schneider respects the reader, so some of this stuff can be a real challenge! But I found it very worthwhile! Matisse's paintings are deceptive, at least to the layperson. They seem soothing and simple. Well, I can promise you that after reading this wonderful book you may still find the paintings soothing, but when you realize what went into the process of creating them you will never again think of them as being simple! This is one of those rare books that opens your eyes and makes you look at something in a completely new way.Reviewer Note: Please be aware that the book I am reviewing is the over 700 page book written by Pierre Schneider, NOT the much shorter book written by Mr. Jacobus and only translated by Mr. Schneider!

For anyone interested in surrealism this book is a must. Aragon is harsh and yet decisive in his uncompromising judgment of what is obsolete and what is not with respect to the surrealist revolution, and his denunciation of 'automatic writing' as poetry is right on the mark. He is so obnoxious and unsparing in his criticism of everyone and everything that the reader immediately realizes he was mistaken in joining the Communist Party and leaving the surrealist movement:he was made for a group that espoused absolute rebellion against everyone and everything conventional, and it was where he belonged. He distinguishes real poets from those he so gently refers to as, "any dog on the street who, like an inexhaustible diarrhea, ceaselessly copies down his insignificant scribblings and dares to compare it with true poetry". Eheheehehe! A must

This book is good, but it's not that good. It's a nice little time capsule. Someone who is not interested in turn of the century Paris or surrealism probably wouldn't enjoy it that much.

Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris is a landmark in the history of modernist literature. The book basically illustrates the surrealist experiences of an "urban peasant" who sees Paris as an ancient, prehistoric landscape, full of mythical creatures. What Aragon does is to illustrate the fragmented and chaotic perception of modern life. Life in modernity is not anymore the predictable experience of past agrarian societies. It becomes agitated where the rule is to shock. Moreover, depicting Paris as an ancient mythical landscape instead of a modern sophisticated environment serves to criticize the dreamy character of capitalism where things appear as if they were always there, devoid of history and social relations. Aragon's book was essential in the development of modern aesthetic theory such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Berger

This new edition of a scare work is welcome not only for the exposure it provides to Aragon and his work (if it can be called that), but for the loving manner in which it is produced. From the covers to the typeface to the translation of newspaper column margins, editor Damon Krukowski and designer Naomi Yang, known more for their musical than literary endevours, have brought attention to the smallest detail, the kind of attention that is the substance of the text itself. The translation, from a 1971 edition, flows perfectly; just alien enough from standard English to draw attention to Aragon's linguistic differences, but not a characature of French style. It would be hard to imagine a better English edition of this work. James L. Wolf

Often considered one of the definitive surrealist novels (along with Andre Breton's NADJA), Paris Peasant is an exhilarating read. Aragon takes us through a special guided tour of Paris--not the Paris as we know it with its Eiffel Tower and other famous landmarks, but a Paris of crumbling arcades, dilapidated shopfronts and suburban parks. Aragon imbues the detritus of the city with poetry and magic, and shows us how the surrealist spirit lives in the outmoded structures of civilization. His ode to the Passage de l'Opera, at that time threatened by Baron Haussmann's plans for the redevelopment of the city, is a tacit challenge to the rapaciousness of capitalism and modernization, with its quest for the ever-new and its destruction of the past. Every urbanite will find something to identify with in this marvellous portrait of Paris in the 1920s.

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (Gallimard, 1926)

Aragon, one of the people at the core of the dada, and later the surrealist, movements in France, is a fantastic poet, like most of them were. However, I'm finding, as I move out to explore the prose of the movements after twenty years of enjoying (and being influenced by) the poetry, that most of them were far better poets than they were novelists. There are exceptions, of course (Rene Daumal's unfinished Mount Analogue and Breton/Eluard's Les Champs Magnetiques both made my best-reads-of-the-year list in the early nineties), but Paris Peasant isn't one of them.

The book's not bad, for what it is, but it could have been so much more. It encompasses three prose works of Aragon's, two of which seem to be that curious mixture of fiction and nonfiction which has become so popular in recent years, and the third of which is indescribable by normal means other than to say it's prose. The first is a travelogue of sorts, a kind of gutter-level guidebook to an area of Paris that most tourists likely stayed well away from. At a hundred twelve pages, it's by far the longest piece in the book. It's also written in almost stream-of-consciousness style, with no real attempt at coherence or flow, making it a more difficult read than it needed to be. The second details an evening Aragon spent with Breton and Marcel Noll strolling through Paris; it's the strongest of the three, the only one where Aragon's long diversions (which are likely to put one in mind of James or Joyce, though Aragon lacks the command of language of either; that, however, could easily be the fault of the translator rather than Aragon himself) really seem as if they're contributing to the piece, rather than distracting. The third, "The Peasant's Dream," doesn't really seem to fit into the short story or memoir categories; it's tempting to hang the godawful "flash fiction" moniker on it, or it would be were it not fifteen pages long. It's not bad, really, but it's not all that great, either; it's just there.

A minor, at best, work in the surrealist catalogue. There are many other things that belong in your collection before you set your sights on this one. ** ½

Cunt is the privileged place of dream. Don't wake me up, cries Aragon. This book is a praise of sleep, and of jewels hidden in it, just like orgasmic death is lurking behind cunt's door. The initial pages are among the greatest poetic treasures of this century.

Maybe it was a bit too "Victorian" for my taste. It was less than I expected.

After an introductory note by the translator, this opens with a Dada or Surrealist poem by Aragon - at least, I think it was supposed to be a poem. In truth, I found this blank verse (and others like it, later in the book) incoherent and repetitive, and unrelated in every way to erotic experience as I understand it. Next, a nihilist short story expresses dysphoria, anhedonia, ennui, and other diseases of the soul that have names only in French. The writer hints at some family, but he seeks out prostitutes instead then despises them even as he expects them to service him. The progression continues, through other short first-person features in varying but dismal moods. One of the cheerier ones comes from an older man, aphasic and paralyzed with tertiary syphilis, watching and musing on various fornications around his rural farmhouse.

"I have never sought out anything but scandal, and I cultivate it for its own sake." So said Aragon, and I imagine that this succeeded even in the intellectual climate of 1928 Paris. The good news is that Aragon fell out with the Surrealists shortly after this was written - one may hope that he moved beyond the literary level of a toddler playing with potty words.

-- wiredweird

It is expected and obvious that the English language speaking public finds a surrealist masterpiece such as Louis Aragon's as intimately obscene, and on such grounds impregnates disparaging critiques that climax with inelegant statements pronounced with a stiff intellectual disregard. Here we do not find the graphic frames of admissable seductive contrivances of a DH Lawrence, rather we unveil a psycholyrical morphology that unsettles and unravels.

The text was originally published in 1928 anonymously by Rene Bonnel, the renowed controversial publisher of greats of the stamp of Jarry, Apollinaire, Pierre Louys and Raymond Rodiguet. Le Con D'Irene was confiscated and the supression of its publication dated through 1968 when authorship became awarded to a Albert de Routisie ( anonymous nome de plume of Aragon), and where five indelible illustrations of Andre Masson illuminated the text. The book, which runs to merely 90 pages, was immediately deemed to be a staple work of surrealist literature, its circulation spurred by the continuous attempts of the French conservative magnates at censure.

There are some aspects of this enigmatic erotic literary engagement that define new features to the previously overripened eros, and - if Cupid was seen as the whimsical child at the court of Aphrodite - we find in Aragon a disavowed Cupid that seems thrust out of the Olympian heights and cast away through to the depths of the underworld. How can sensuality be intellectual? The answer which the surrealist had found consensus within is best elucidated through this novella. The two most prominent aspect of the aforementioned change reflect the expression of disgust and transgression, as well as the ritual and magic that eroticism is akin to. In the first instance we are issued a sedimented encounter that seeks to define the limits of subjectivity by violating its comfort; In the second we meet a spiritual affirmation that absolves of moral imperatives the natural, the carnal and the law of desire which, by way of transgression, accentuates its pleasure, not by suspending rational strictures but by rendering them in a methodology of habit and order that incarcerates the mind as much as the flesh.

Philosophically this is a testament to a dialectic of desire that was being premised by Freudian analytical techniques, particularly as elucidated in Totem and Taboo and Civilazion and its Discontent, through an associative paradigm that functioned within a syntax of condensation and displacement. Namely the erotic was redrawn to overwrite the biological and inscribe a pattern of social stimuli that causes the sublimation of libininal sensibilities. Aesthetic sensibilities need not be seduced but more aptly raped; this was the new invitation to the intellectual Bacchanalia of modernism. There is a force that destabilizes the ego and announces the intercourse of the political with the enervated energy of the id. Here we realize that the act itself is not as sensually satisfying as the voyeuristic distance perpetrated. The closer one comes to desire the farther one is from satisfying it. These are not easy arguements of psychological valence, and to make this encounter all the more problematic, there is a mystical eruption of hysterical proportions that functions as an excess to the repressive implications of social mores.

If as Georges Bataille put it "sexual union is a compromise, a half-way house between life and death" then in Aragon's piece we find a true exponenet of such anxious absolutions; If mystical ecstasy is procured by the absolute expression of ego-psychic abandonment then eroticism is a psychological quest not alien to death; If temptation and irreverence are prophylactic ensurers of a fractured self, then Aragon's prose is a fundamental exponenet of these thematic effusions clad in a literary dress. Louis Aragon, much like Apollinare, was a a literary exponent that stood in the midst of a dialogue in flux between the traditional and the avant-garde. His prose reads beautifully, ecstatically, and is sharpened by an eloquence of the keenest powers. One may easily mistake the excellent rendition of Alexis Lykiard for a page of Nabakov's Lolita - the Russian author was, not surprisingly, an enthusiastic reader of surrealist fiction and particularly of Aragon. This is not trash literature any more than Salvador Dali's or Frida Khalo's paintings are obscene maniacal art. Its fascination stems from a sustained adoptive enterprise that surveyed the works of Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, and Catullus, where the word more prudely and properly translated genitalia is a mainstay of creative exuberance and mysogynistic exploitation. Here Louis Aragon does not stray far from such lamenting, rather he materially propagates what a Blake, for example, sought to do metaphysically during the English Romantic era. Obviously however the two could not be farther apart, but this is for the same reason that a circle's beginning and end meet at some point to close the spherical index.

Finally it is to the title that we must return our gaze. It is the creative impulse turned inside out: the phallic lust is made absent to make for a wounded rational slip that engorges, engrosses and hides as it absorbes the thrsut of passion in favour of a fanciful praxis.
A book that ultimately fails, as did surrealism proper, because of the impossibility of rationalizing the irrational, the chaotic sterility that intention will forever be bound to, even as the claim to spontaneity is advanced. Albeit this is a work that deserved a readership, if for no other reason, a fund of critical treasures and lyrical dexterity. Postmodernism could not have been possible were it not for the surrealist endeavors at supplying the libidinal with a transcendental pulsion that is both ecstatic (as in beyond the essence) and intense (as in within it). Irene is the a transliteration of the Greek Eirenes, namely the goddess of Spring, of nature, the Satyr's energy force, reminding us that it is in absence that creativity is spurred rather than in fullness (plenum): The gestation of Desire is implicated through a lack. Here we find a healthy tension where if you are partially disgusted and partially appalled you lend merit to a literary exposition of unrest as a force of change. Ultimately the one aim was freedom and we cannot achieve freedom unless we strive to go beyond the limits set about us by cultural prescriptions and such like determinants.

I've got something of a selective taste. For instance, I can read a book of depravity should the style resonate something within myself. Bataille's Story of the Eye did not reach me in a positive way, I found its grotesqueries too vivid and realistic to enjoy...and since reading it I have been wary of this sort of "Surrealist Erotica."

Meanwhile, Flesh Unlimited has continued to pop up on my reccomended page, so after a bit of hesitation, I ordered and read the thing. I must say I find it more enjoyable than Story of the Eye due to the manner in which it was written.

Apollinaire's first story (The Eleven Thousand Rods) is absolutely hilarious. The "action" in it is so over the top, cartoonishly scatological...expulsions of all sorts from the body descibed in almost campy detail. The characters in the story have no repercussions in mind regarding their actions, and the text feels as though Apollinaire felt the same in the way in which he wrote it. The story is essentially that of an unfulfilled promise (made in the throes of passion) and follows a man's quest across Eurasia and his various sexual conquests (featuring loads of "buggering," incest, sexual violence...even pedophelia and necrophelia). This may all sound shocking, but I assure you, it is written is such a manner that makes you snicker with an "O god" as opposed to shuddering.

Apollinaire's second story, the infamous Confessions of a Young Don Juan, is written with less brevity. It is about a young man's early sexual awakening. While the boy's age is about 17 at the time of the story, the narration and content make him seem very, very, very young - around 12. This can add all sorts of disturbing overtones to the story if that sort of thing bothers you. I found this selection less enjoyable than the first.

Finally the book closes with Louis Aragon's classic story Le C** d'Irene, which, as mentioned in an earlier review, is written in more of a "classic" surrealist style than anything else. If, at the very least, you are familiar with the chaotic "cut-up" style of William S. Burroughs, you should be more than able to handle and enjoy it.

Overall the collection is entertaining and sometimes (albiet, for me, less frequently) titillating. If you're apprehensive as to whether or not this will offend you after this review, maybe you should hold off until you're more confident. However, I was not put off by Flesh Unlimited in the slightest, much to my surprise.

First thing to note about this book is that it is not one book. Its actually three different stories written by different french erotic authors. That being said, Let me explain that the authors are vastly different in style and mood. For Example, The story "memiors of a young don juan" is written very much like how you would expect a normal erotic novel to be written that panders more towards hedonism: "My sister, then, had tumbled to the foot of the stairs. She lay there with her skirt dissarranged, making no effort to get up again"
While the story "Le C** D'Irene" is much more surrealistic then erotic. Mostly just rambling in foul language: "Don't wake me, for gods sake, you bastards, don't wake me, watch out I bite I see red."
I don't care for the surrealistic rambling bit because I don't find it terribly creative and more foul then anything. Although I did enjoy the other stories quite a bit which read more like books. the writing is well done, which doesn't surprise me since I believe the translator of this book also did a good translation of marldoror I believe. Although, this is not extremely artistic or extremely elegent. It is very good if you are interested in reading some very hedonistic erotica that is extremely well written with a bit of artist in it.

I read these reviews of these supposed risqué novels and every time I buy the book I'm disappointed. I keep waiting for that moment where the novel leaps out of my hands and inappropriately exposes itself in a dark alley to my fragile mind. Perhaps my expectations were to high, with a name like `flesh unlimited, surrealist erotica' one would expect sexual acts from the deepest parts of the mind, unhindered by social-taboo or even personal-unconscious-censorship, things that perhaps aren't even physically possible but are some sort of `conceptual-art-sex-act.' I've read more titillating sexual accounts and fantasies in `seventeen magazine' - which by the way I highly recommend.

If your looking for something `new' don't get this, or `the Torture Garden' by Octave Mirbeau - that's a pretty over hyped one too, it would have done well to STAY out of print. Try J.G. Ballard, Carlton Mellick III, Georges Bataille, Marquis De Sade, or even William S. Burroughs.

With all my due respect to Guillaume Apollinaire The Poet, this is the first book in my life that I threw away.
This is something... it is hard to find a proper name for it. To begin with, this is not erotica. For those who is looking for erotica, this book will be a sheer disappointment. Erotica induces desire. This book provokes disgust.

This is a crude pornography written by a talented person without gag reflex. Yes, talented. This is why it is so pictorially repulsive. And without a gag reflex - because normal person cannot read it without nausea. I can only surmise that this repugnant masterpiece was written for diversion.

If you like reading about animalistic sex in odorous slimy excrements, this book is for you.

Apollinaire delivers some of the most explicit erotica ever committed to the printed page, managing to do so with wit and a refreshing matter-of-fact bluntness that never degenerates into a mere exhibition of so-called perversion. This is not for the squeamish, or those easily put off by marginal sexual practices. These two works act as a fantastic clean sweep of the residual psychological Victorianism that still permeates our society, even after the sexual revolution. Like Bataille's "Story of the Eye" without that author's harrowing social vivisections, this book has caused more than one ostensibly jaded friend to recoil in disgust. That Apollinaire manages this with style is a testament to his twisted genius.

SCARED FOR LIFE! Porn queen runs to ex-husband as lover is taken in by Po-Po. I was all washed up and there was a relentless wave of phone calls upon me when I found this book. A treatise on parisian intellectual theatrics, these adventures are an unbelievable example of how utterly likable surrealist pretensions can be. It is sure to cheer you up (even cures minor ailments).

Aragon demonstrates his involvement in the Paris DADA scene with this excellent proto-Surrealist work. In the tradition of Alfred Jarry, he presents an utterly fantastic tale full of wonderful nonsense and absurd wit. That Surrealism arose from DADA is evident in his juxtaposing of unrelated ideas and use of automatic writing techniques (the latter of which produces an effect similar to Breton's Magnetic Fields). If you like the work of Jarry, Schwitters, Tzara, and the like, then you will probably enjoy this.

Man oh man, what a trial it was trying to get into this book. I'm normally a fan of surrealist writing (see my reviews of Breton's NADJA, Aragon's PARIS PEASANT and Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET) but TELEMACHUS seems to me to be a rather torturous exercise in literary gymnastics. I've been told that in this work Aragon pulls out all the stops as he uses every pun, metaphor and literary device available to rework and subvert French literary traditions. It doesn't seem to have come off too well in the translation though. The plot is very loosely based around the adventures of Telemachus, who is shipwrecked on a fantastical island with his androgynous Mentor. On the way he is tempted by the blandishments of Calypso and her nymphs. But that's about as much plot as you get. The narrative (if one can call it that) consists of sentences strung in a truly surrealist manner. Remember how the Parisian Surrealists were all enchanted by that one famous line by Lautreamont about the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine? Well, in this work Aragon takes these surrealist juxtapositions to the extreme. The result is initially surprising and one cannot doubt the startling beauty of some of the images originally afforded by this technique, but when the entire book is written in this fashion, it gets very hard indeed. Not a good introduction to surrealist writing at all--in fact, it really put me off. Read it if you absolutely MUST.

Louis Aragon (1897-1982) published the most enchanting of all surrealist novels, translated as "Paris Peasant," in 1924. Two years earlier, on the cusp between DADAism and surrealism he had inverted (and perverted) the 17th-century didactic book of the same title by Fenelon. Both authors imagined Telemachus, son of crafty Ulysses and patient (and far-from-guileless) Penelope, setting out to find out why his father has not returned to Greece with the other victors of the Trojan War.

Telemachus and his ancient Mentor (the goddess of wisdom, Minerva in gender-crossing disguise) wash up on the shores of Ogygia, where his father had earlier dallied with Calypso and her nymphs. The family resemblance is instantly noticed, and Calypso wants to take up with the younger image of the lover who abandoned her. He is also lusted after by the nymph Eucharis.

I am making it sound as if there was a plot, but the book is almost entirely digressions that are not senseless, but are mostly pointless, as Aragon played with words and the strange juxtapositions DADAists conjured and adored. I would estimate that the text is less than 20,000 words. Perhaps it is delightful in French, though I doubt it. It was certainly a provocation, including a lesbian tryst and the debauching a virtuous youth (the inversion of Fenelon). In the formulation of the helpful (trés academic) introduction by the brave translators), Aragon (et al.) "freed himself from the constraints of mimeticism in regard to fable, meaning, and language, ... dissociated language from significance... [and] generated a verbal overflow or overkill, kindling the desire for and the voluptuousness of verbal indulgence"... which is not everyone's glass of absinthe.