Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou

(Hardback)

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Isidore Isou was a young Jew in war-time Bucharest, and barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris where in 1945 he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and May 68.

In Speaking East Andrew Hussey presents a colourful picture of the post-war Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avant-garde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafs and Isou, as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis, gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank and had sex with the Parisian intellectual lite.

This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of the avant-garde.

Reviews

"Isou's life is at once tragic and farcical: a whirling reprise of all of the twentieth century's artistic avantgardes played out against the backdrop of Paris's Left Bank in its heyday. Hussey is the ideal chronicler, and his biography, with its exuberant prose, both channels Isou's restless creativity and positions it within the main currents of postwar French thought. Essential reading." -- Will Self, author of "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" and "Umbrella" "A sympathetic account of an extraordinary life. Hussey has the depth of historical understanding necessary to do justice both to Isidore Isou's glamorous, sometimes absurd, life as a hero of the Left Bank and to the horrors of the Romanian Holocaust he had escaped. This is an expertly told story about Paris, Europe, and the interplay of private passion and public trauma." -- Sebastian Faulks, author of "Birdsong"

Author Bio

Andrew Hussey was formerly dean and professor at the University of London in Paris. He has written for the New Statesman, Observer, and New York Times, and his books include Paris: The Secret History and The French Intifada. He lives in Paris.