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the complete review - biography / literary criticism

Raymond Roussel
and the Republic of Dreams

by
Mark Ford

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : fine introduction to a fascinating figure and his unusual work

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Impressed by Ford's achievement, though most focus on describing Roussel and his work, rather than the book.

  From the Reviews:

• "Mark Ford is quite clear that Roussel was unbalanced by any social standard you might care to impose, but he is also unworried by the nuttiness of his subject. He seeks to explore the poetry of Roussel, and somehow to make accessible to an English-language readership the striking, wild and bedazzling effects that Roussel's "procedure" dragged out of language itself. (...) Less a biography than a reader's guide, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams could be described as an academic book were it not so stylishly written and quirkily constructed. (I must add that the scholarly bibliography and the excellent index are not quirky at all.)" - David Bellos, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Quite apart from these singular achievements, we have his works. No words can describe them adequately, though Mark Ford, in his delicate, patient and tactful way, sets forth their procedures with admirable clarity. His book should swell the numbers of those now dedicated to furthering la gloire of Raymond Roussel." - Stephen Romer, The Guardian
  
  
• "With great vivacity he has written a declaration of literary fealty disguised, or rather displayed, as a biography (.....) As a biography, Ford's book is superb, the aptest initiation into Roussel's life and work in any language (including Roussel's)." - Richard Howard, The New Republic
  
  
• "As he has reached near-canonical status in France, people have tended to dwell on the life more than the work. But in this wonderful, first full-length account in English, the poet Ford has struck an impeccable balance. Roussel emerges as a luminous, unique figure, 'outrageous in his innocence and logic'. Reading this book, one understands why Breton said that he, along with Lautréamont, is 'the greatest hypnotist of modern times.'" - Will Hobson, The Observer
  
  
• "Now Cornell University Press and Mark Ford offer this marvelous compendium: part homage, part biography, part bones and spine upon which the corpus will be reconstructed." - James Sallis, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "Ford, himself a poet, is illuminating on the subject of Roussel's working methods. (...) Although this is principally a literary biography, Ford never loses sight of the strange man behind the strange work." - Paul Bailey, The Sunday Times
  
  
• "Ford's book is where anyone looking to initiate themselves into the mysteries of the Rousselian should begin. He provides detailed summaries of the novels, plays and poems, drawing our attention to repeated themes (such as transvestitism and androgyny), and shows how Roussel's writing "can almost invariably be resolved into neatly balanced antitheses": black/white; male/female; imitation/uniqueness. His reassessment of all the major debates surrounding Roussel's life, death and art is a massive labour of accumulation and consolidation." - Ian Pindar, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The French author Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the more remarkable literary figures of his day. He produced vast amounts of material, which he paid to have published and produced on the stage. He had some unusual ideas about writing, and concocted complex approaches to it. And while he never achieved much success, or the public attention he so hoped for, he has been tremendously influential.
       From Michel Leiris, an early and important supporter, through the surrealists and to modern authors such as Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Harry Mathews he made a significant impression. Among the writers who have written biographical and critical works about him are such notables as Michel Foucault and Annie Le Brun. John Ashbery, who also wrote the foreword to this volume, has long been a champion of Roussel and planned to write his doctoral thesis on him; he never completed that project, but did publish several essays on the man and his work.
       Mark Ford's biography is, however, still "only the second book ever written on Roussel in English" (so Ford), the first being Rayner Heppenstall's brief overview. Though much of Roussel's work has been translated, Ford's work is a welcome introduction to both the man and the work. Ford offers both biography and a critical study of Roussel's unusual literary undertakings. Roussel's life and work were equally bizarre. They make for fascinating material, and Ford makes the most of them.
       Roussel came from a wealthy family, and he was the pampered third child of a doting and overbearing mother. Mom was a dominant figure in Roussel's life, which probably wasn't for the best. Ford notes that after the death of his brother "Madame Roussel insisted that her surviving son should undergo a medical examination every day." On their last foreign holiday together (they were rarely apart), in 1910, they went to India and Ceylon. Madame Roussel brought along a coffin, so as not inconvenience the other travellers in case she passed away during the voyage -- thoughtfulness of a kind one does not often encounter.
       Roussel himself also had a number of odd habits. He lived a life of absurd luxury. He had peculiar dining habits (with Ford offering two perhaps typical menus in one of the appendices). He had a thirty-foot automobile roulotte constructed for him, with a bedroom, study, bathroom, and dormitory for three domestics; when he drove it to Rome Mussolini visited it and was suitably impressed -- and the Pope also expressed interest in it. Roussel travelled extensively and yet seems to have been the least likely tourist imaginable. Ford quotes Michel Leiris, who noted:

It seems likely that the outside world never broke through into the universe he carried within him, and that, in all the countries he visited, he saw only that which he had put there in advance (...)

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Links:

• Faber & Faber publicity page
• Cornell University Press publicity page
• Article at the Cornell Daily Sun

• The Guardian
• New York Press
• The Observer
• Review of Contemporary Fiction

• Reading Raymond Roussel by Trevor Winkfield, in Context
• Biography
• Locus Solus
• A lovely Curiosity: Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) by William Clark
• La rhétorique de l'invention de Raymond Roussel à l'Oulipo : résumé by Christelle Reggiani

• How I Wrote Certain of my Books

• Michel Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth
• John Ashbery's Other Traditions, with a chapter on Roussel

• See books by Roussel-fan Harry Mathews
• Georges Perec's Roussel-tinged Life A User's Manual
• Jeff Noon's metamorphiction, Cobralingus
• See Index of French literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

       Mark Ford is a poet, and a lecturer in English literature at University College, London

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© 2001-2010 the complete review

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