Product Description

The most inclusive and comprehensive selection of Nerval's brilliant poems, memoirs, fictions, and essays ever to appear in English.

Charles Baudelaire regarded Nerval as the most lucid poet of the age, and Marcel Proust ranked him as one of its greatest prose writers. Andre Breton claimed Nerval as the precursor of Surrealism, and Antonin Artaud placed him in the same visionary company as Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh. This selection of writings provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belletrist, short-story writer, and autobiographer. In addition to "Aurelia," the memoir of his madness, "Sylvie" (considered a "masterpiece" by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of "The Chimeras," this volume includes Nerval's doppelgnger tales and experimental fictions. Selections from his correspondence demonstrate a lucid awareness of the strategies by which nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his visionary imagination to the purgatory of mental illness. This volume will confirm Nerval's major place in literary history as much more than the amiable eccentric who walked live lobsters on blue ribbons through the streets of Paris.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116313 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-01
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140446012
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
Original Language: French

About the Author
Gerard de Nerval (1805-55) was an inveterate traveller, and made many contributions of travel literature to various periodicals. He was also a prolific poet and wrote many tales including 'Sylvie' (1853), his most read work. Richard Sieburth is Professor of French at New York University. He has translated Walter Benjamin's 'Moscow Diary' and Michel Leiris' 'Nights as Day/Days as Night'.

Customer Reviews

The Ruined Tower
Nerval was the Mother of All Bohemians, a romantic eccentric who set the stage for latter-day zanies from Arthur Rimbaud to John Wieners. His most famous stunt was parading through Paris with a lobster, explaining to his friends: "He does not bark, and he knows the secrets of the deep." With the beautiful, dense, enigmatic poems in 'The Chimeras' he virtually invented literary Modernism, while 'Aurelia' is one of the most touching accounts of schizophrenia ever written (the book is worth it for these two pieces alone, along with the proto-Proustian 'Sylvie'). Nerval's tragic disintegration, ending in suicide in 1855, seems to mark the point where Romanticism turned from fantasy and Nature to madness and derangement, a pattern that still plays out in our culture in a hundred different ways. Sieburth's a little intrusive with the prefaces and footnotes--he seems anxious you might not 'get' Nerval without his help. The sections are also arranged thematically instead of chronologically, which makes it hard to trace his development as a writer. But the notes include plenty of useful biographical information, and for the money it's easily the best selection of Nerval's writings in English. A great intro to a fascinating writer.

An excellent phantasmagoric collection!
I came upon this volume by chance, after it won a translation prize from PEN, but was glad I did. Nerval seems to take up a curious position in literary history, and though is something of an eccentric, he was loved by later writers (Proust) and by artists (Joseph Cornell). The stories are strange and fantastic, travel narratives which are more journeys of the mind than actual travels. Anyone with an interest in the surreal, or in the fabular fictions of Calvino or Borges, will find these stories a delight. The stories raise questions about identity, sanity and madness, and linguisticly are truly alluring.

Also included are a number of poems and letters, which combined with the prose pieces present a great picture of the author's whole work. It seems like the best place to start for anyone who has not read Nerval before, but I'm sure that dedicated enthusiasts will find new pleasure in the excellent translation and the lucid editorial expositions that Richard Sieburth provides throughout the text.

Nerval's eccentricities and mental illness
I'm in a constant search for writers with mental illness.
Gerard de Nerval fits the bill and as a 19th Century
French writer bent on eccentricities and called bousingos or
'rowdies' known for their orgies, eating ice cream out of skulls,
nudity at seminars. Nerval went insane and spent the rest of
his life in and out of an asylum and eventually killed himself......the end
of his considered greatest work Aurelia was in his pocket was found
in his pocket when he hung himself. Aurelia is his account of his
fall into madness. I'm going to read it again. I read everything only
once, i'll start re-reading with this book.