Rimbaud: A Biography - Hardcover

Robb, Graham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393049558 ISBN 13: 9780393049558

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2000

Synopsis

A biography of the French poet also delves into Rimbaud's lives outside of literature, including his stints as an explorer, mercenary gun runner, and friend to slave traders.

About this title

About the Author

Graham Robb's two previous books, Victor Hugoand Balzac, were New York Times Notable Books. He lives in Oxford, England.

Reviews

In this robust biography, Robb (Balzac; Victor Hugo) contemplates the life of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) as if the French poet/ vagabond's deeds were those of a mythic hero. Rimbaud's every impulse is viewed as the expression of a coherent, wildly innovative vision of the world; his artistic accomplishments are assumed to have redeemed his devious and destructive tendencies. Thus, when the academically gifted Rimbaud produced other students' homework for a price, the burgeoning genius was operating "a parasitic service industry feeding on the education system," which Robb posits as a "splendid achievement for a child of fifteen." When Rimbaud spread his own excrement on the table of a Parisian caf? as if it were plaster for a fresco, he was making the critical point that "flat canvas and oils could not compete with the three-dimensional kaleidoscope of reality." And when discussing the poet's use of blackmail to secure the attentions of his lover, poet Paul Verlaine, Robb dryly notes that Rimbaud "never allowed conventional morality to ruin a practical arrangement." The author seldom admits ambiguity. He is most effective in his effort to blend Rimbaud's early life as a bohemian social deviant with his subsequent 16-year career in Africa as a fledgling anthropologist and explorer. Rimbaud's childhood wanderings through the French countryside matured into caravans across the deserts. His youthful willingness to venture the unmapped lifestyle of the homosexual prepared him to encounter the exotic cultures of Abyssinia. His literary works, from "Le B?teau ivre" to "Voyelles" and "Une Saison en enfer," invariably focused on fluctuation, on moments of departure. According to Robb, these poems were crowbars that pried Rimbaud loose from family, tradition and society. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The model modern writer was a late-nineteenth-century French teenager, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), who grew up fatherless under the heavy hand of a cold, irascible mother. No one knew what to do when he began flouting every rule he could, for he was the most gifted student his small town had ever seen. At 15, he jaunted off to Paris to promote himself to the avant-garde poets of the time, such as Paul Verlaine, who took him for his lover so passionately that, culminating the most famous homosexual lovers' quarrel in history, he shot him. At 19, Rimbaud gave up poetry to pursue a life of wandering opportunism that, given his lifelong chutzpah, was entirely in character. He made and lost fortunes in Africa, and men and women in bed, and rebellious young writers have rallied to his call for "derangement of the senses" ever since. Robb is an exciting writer, a good scholar, and a literary enthusiast, and although he avoids the artificiality of fiction, he makes Rimbaud as vivid as a novelistic antihero. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393049558
• ISBN 13: 9780393049558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544