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Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion

 

In full compliance with FTC Guidelines, I received this ebook for free in exchange for a fair and honest review. I was in no way compensated for this post as a reviewer, and the thoughts are my own.

Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion By Barbara Scott Emmett Publisher: Pentalpha Publishing Edinburgh/Triskele Books Pub. Date: October 20, 2014 = today, on Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday! ISBN: 978-0952884392 Pages: 435 Genre: literary fiction Source: Received from the author in conjunction with a guest-post hosted by France Book Tours Goodreads Buy the book: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

This book counts for the following Reading Challenges:

 

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BOOK

I am afraid the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) may not be very well known from English speaking readers. He is one of the must read poets for all French students, well at least he was in my younger years. I even had to memorize one of his poems in grade school! He is a notorious representative of the decadent world of 19th century French artists: part of his creativity is closely connected to drugs and alcohol – absinthe was the big thing then.
So when Barbara Scott Emmet contacted me for a guest-post on France Book Tours on his birthday, I accepted with enthusiasm. She graciously offered me her novel on La chasse sirituelle, a possible missing manuscript by Rimbaud: I was thrilled! Her novel Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion, is a perfect Rimbaldian novel, with all the ingredients worthy of the man!

The literary novel is built in three parts all entitled with famous words or works by Rimbaud:

1.  Derangement of all senses (Le dérèglement de tous les sens). In a 1871 letter, he wrote:
   “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault.”
2. Life is a farce. He wrote: “Life is a farce we all must play“
3. A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer) – which is the name of one of his most famous poems, an extended poem in prose written in 1873.

A Rimbaud’s statue in Paris.
I took this picture in 2012

Intertwined within these 3 parts are 8 different tracks to follow. At first, it seemed confusing and I had to take notes, but then everything made sense. It is also a wonderful way of conveying the confusion experienced by Rimbaud himself and of creating a perfectly Rimbaldian and delusional atmosphere:

1. Terence Tanfield’s Blog – in 2004. It took me a while to figure out things about this old guy. Through the internet and Google, he tries to track down what happened to La chasse spirituelle, this mysterious missing manuscript some Rimbaud’s specialists think is still somewhere. Is this manuscript for real, or another fake, like the one that showed up in the 1940s and was eventually identified as a hoax put together by several authors? But will he live long enough to find out?
2. Andrea Mann – in 2004. She teaches business French in a private school. Her partner Patsy left her. In the ambiance of Rimbaud’s life, see next entry #3, it made sense to make Andrea a lesbian.
   Distraught, she focuses on her other passion, Rimbaud.  She visits Charleville-Mézières, Rimbaud’s home town, with its Rimbaud’s museum. At his tomb, she meets a young guy pretending  to be Rimbaud reincarnated. He has papers entitled La chasse spirituelle. She always dreamed of discovering this text, so this is enough to pull her in into a crazy adventure with that mysterious creature and his weirdo friend Albert, a magician? A hypnotist?
   She gets totally entangled as they ask her to make public the discovery of La chasse spirituelle. But is it the real text? A forgery? As she even seen all of it? Where is this going to lead her?
   This alludes to another major element for Rimbaud, this mysterious grey zone between what is real or not, mostly due to the use of drugs and alcohol. And drugs and alcohol there is, with semi rituals around absinthe drinking to which Andrea is introduced.
   There’s a funny passage when Andrea and “Rimboy” meet in a bar. As absinthe is no longer served in 21st century France, he drinks Ricard!!

   Rimbaud does that to people. It’s not enough to like him. You find yourself wanting to be him.

3. Diary of Mathilde Verlaine – in 1871-1872. Paul Verlaine, another great poet of the time, was married and had a son with her, but Verlaine and Rimbaud were also lovers, with quite animated and complicated relationships. This is perfectly  rendered here through Mathilde’s diary. Naïve, protected by a rich milieu, she quickly goes from the excitement of meeting a famous poet to being appalled and scandalized when she finally realizes the nature of their connection. She has the most interesting words to describe the “rascal”, eventually “the monster”: “untidy…filthy, ill-mannered, surly, insolent – and pungent.” Her father worked out their legal separation.
4. Journal by Rimbaud – in 1871-1872. Written in France, England, and Belgium, it illustrates his relationship with Verlaine, with lots of cat-and-mouse play, sex, and violence. Paul ends up accidentally shooting Rimbaud. The former got two years of hard labor, even though the latter was only slightly wounded. But remember that homosexuals were not accepted by the society of the time.
   Many f* words are used in these sections. I believe a contemporary Rimbaud would indeed use them profusely.
   The entries of his journal witness to his discovery of hallucinations and degradations (cf. the derangement of all senses) as a way to becoming a seer and a poet.
5. The secret papers of Jean Martins – in 1872-1902. Jean is a legal clerk at Verlaine’s father-in-law’s attorney. A poet himself in his leisurely hours, he can’t but have a look when he is asked one day to put away poetry papers owned by the Verlaines. He will not forget them when decades later, the owner of the law office dies, and he needs to empty the place.
6. Letters from Simone to Edouard – during WWI. Edouard is at the front. As this is not mentioned in the synopsis, I am not going to tell you the connection with the manuscript. But this is an important historical background of course. Rimbaud even wrote a most famous poem on a dead soldier – the one I had to learn as a young kid! I will only say that this added an extra place to look for the manuscript and made the quest even more complicated.
   Her letters also mention the terrible influenza epidemics in Paris in 1916.
7. My Life in Paris and Berlin – 1926-1939. Diary by Aurore Lefevre and her friend Dora, a Jewish girl. They used to work at Les Folies Bergère, the famous Paris cabaret music hall established in 1869. This is part of the chain to follow the manuscript. And of course the Holocaust is alluded to.
8. The Case of the Missing Manuscript: A Charlie Dick Mystery. Mr Dick is an American private detective in Paris. Someone, I won’t reveal who, comes to ask him to track down the manuscript. Who is she? Why? Will he succeed? How? Through him, lots of missing pieces of the puzzle get put together.

Along the narrative, the author manages to insert elements of Rimbaud’s poetry, for instance his famous synaesthesia, also experienced by the other great French poet Baudelaire, through which he associated names and nouns with colors.

Also, Andrea experiences constant uneasiness and memory issues. She is totally confused about what’s going on, wondering if this is all real, or a nightmare, or the effect of drugs and hypnotism. Typically Rimbaldian.

And she really has no clues as to the main goal behind all this. The reader has no clue either. I was a bit disappointed when everything was revealed, it fell a bit flat to me after this amazing chasse (hunt) for La chasse!

I did not feel comfortable either with Andrea’s ecstasy and illuminations, but I guess she is represented as experiencing what Rimbaud experienced about what she sees as the relativity of truth. And I have to disagree with that, I think reality and truth are not relative. I may be wrong, but that’s how I perceived this passage, the way the reader was led to it through Andrea. Inserted in Rimbaud’s diary, this would not have bothered me, but where it came, in Andrea’s ultimate experience, it made me uncomfortable in the sense that I found it presented as an important message of the book.

Nothing was real. It’s all made up. All invention. We decide what reality we want, everything is right.

There are neat descriptions of France, of Paris. I loved the evocation of the vast flea market (we use the same expression in French: le marché aux puces) area in Saint-Ouen, where Andrea and a journalist go to try to find clues about the manuscript.

VERDICT: With its multiple stories withing the story, Delirium is the perfect Rimbaldian novel to make you familiar with the world of the most famous French poet. Barbara Scott Emmet manages a tour de force by mixing Rimbaud 19th century and 21st century France, as her character chase the elusive manuscript Rimbaud may have left behind. Enter the chase, be ready for the trip!

WHAT IS IT ABOUT

 

Barbara Scott Emmett has published novels, short stories and a book of poetry.
Her work has also appeared in anthologies and magazines.
She has been fascinated by Arthur Rimbaud for many years.
A play about him (Death Without Tears) was performed on the Edinburgh Fringe.
A new novel Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion will be published in association with Triskele Books in October 2014.

Visit her website and her blog, with lots of extra material on her upcoming novel!
Follow her on Facebook, and Twitter or on Goodreads.
Subscribe to her mailing list (see in the right side bar).
You can also send her an email pentalphapublishing at live [dot] co [dot] uk

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HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK YET?
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