Book description
Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte
de Lautr amont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of
unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most
astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences
of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the
incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of
angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and
strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns,
this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers
as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andr Gide and Andr Breton; it was
hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and
revelatory masterpiece.
