Locus Solus

Author(s): Raymond Roussel

Novel | France | Translated fiction

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is taking a group of visitors on a tour of "Locus Solus", his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780714544564
  • : Alma Classics
  • : Alma Books Limited
  • : 0.253105
  • : August 2017
  • : 19.80 cmmm X 12.80 cmmm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Raymond Roussel
  • : Paperback
  • : 1712
  • : en
  • : 843/.912
  • : 224
  • : Rupert Copeland Cuningham