Impressions of Africa

(Paperback)

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Description

The first of Roussels two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussels groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

Reviews

An imagination which joins the mathematicians delirium to the poets logic this, among other marvels, is what one discovers in the novels of Raymond Roussel. -- Raymond Queneau

Author Bio

Raymond Roussel (18771933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, chess enthusiast, neurasthenic and drug addict. Through his novels, poems and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th-century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo and the authors of the Nouveau Roman.