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Title: Journey to the Orient by Gerard De Nerval, Norman Glass ISBN: 0-7206-1096-6 Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 01 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Sheikhs, Caliphs, and Hashish.
Comment: I'm sure that it's a fairly select demographic that buys books by this guy, or has ever heard of him for that matter. He's not necessarily one of those authors that's going to win over a lot of people nowadays even if they do "rediscover" him. Oprah's not going to feature Gerard de Nerval in her little book club. He is just simply too bizarre, too occult and obscure, too "rococo" for the average reader, and I guess he always was. But for those very reasons, there are certain people who will think he's the best thing before or since sliced bread.
Evidently fond of exotic locales, customs, women, drugs, etc, it only follows that this nineteenth-century Frenchman would find himself magnetically drawn to the "Orient," to the fabled meccas of Beirut, Cairo, and of course the "font of drug-taking" itself, Constantinople, where he could liberally sample the world-renowned hashish and slave-girls without fear of reprimand from neurotic Europeans obsessed with "propriety." (Indeed his descriptions of such phenomena are just as offensive to the ultra-PC postmodernist of today as they were to his bourgeois contemporaries - and for essentially identical reasons.) He is very much the chauvinist white guy who feels entitled to indulge when among "inferiors."
The pedantic intricacy of his descriptions is surely a literary reflection of the action of the drug. "Journey to the Orient" is no ordinary travel-journal; it may be doubted whether half the events recounted ever actually transpired; but the details are consistently rendered with hallucinogenic clarity. In fact, only a few fragments of the original massive tome are included in this translation, but the entire second portion consists of a tale supposedly overheard in a Constantinopolitan coffee-and-hash house, a re-telling, with florid embellishments, of the Masonic legend of the building of Soliman's (Solomon's) Temple and the murder of the architect Adoniram (Hiram Abiff) - yet the narrative never looses the conviction of first-hand experience. I picked the following passage at random - it gives an idea of the baroque style of the book:
"Darkness suddenly falls and the sky is muffled by black specks which grow bigger as they approach; flocks of birds tumble into the temple, divide into groups, form circles, jostle together, arranging themselves finally into a sumptuous, shimmering foliage; while their wings unfold into opulent bouquets of green, scarlet, jet-black and azure."
It's easy to see why Gerard de Nerval was such an icon for Surrealists like Joseph Cornell. One can open the book to any page and find such immediately visceral passages; the context is almost unimportant. Life is a dream, a sequence of fantastic images, and the best literature can do is to embody the existential experience. If this sounds like your cup of hashish-paste, then dig in.
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Title: Aurelia and Other Writings by Gerard De Nerval, Geoffrey Wagner, Robert Duncan, Marc Lowenthal, Gent Sturgeon, Gerard De Nerval ISBN: 187897209X Publisher: Exact Change Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron's Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings by Giorgio De Chirico ISBN: 1878972065 Publisher: Exact Change Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Selected Writings by Gerard De Nerval, Richard Sieburth, Gerard De Nerval ISBN: 014044601X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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