A poet, storyteller, playwright, and French essayist, this author created a singular literary output of striking originality and dazzling imaginative force. Their work is characterized by experiments with descriptive techniques applied with an almost obsessive fixation. This approach led to a form of automatic writing, establishing them as one of the most brilliant figures of the surrealist movement.
The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.
Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is taking a group of visitors on a tour of "Locus Solus", his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.
The translation of Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique brings a unique blend of sparkle and energy, transforming the work from an intriguing rumor into an accessible masterpiece for English-speaking audiences. Mark Ford's rendition not only captures the essence of Roussel's bizarre narrative but also serves as an invaluable resource for poets and literary enthusiasts alike, enriching their understanding of this enigmatic text.
This play by Roussel is not really a play, but a series of bizarre narratives cut up and distributed among the cast. It should be read as a novel, a novel as strange as anything he wrote, in other words very strange indeed.The Dust of Suns is the second of two plays Roussel wrote in response to heavy criticism of his previous 'adaptations'. Championed by Marcel Duchamp, yet still popularly unsuccessful, Roussel died impoverished and in suspicious circumstances shortly afterwards.
