Locus Solus [Paperback]

[H]e was a seminal influence on surrealism, Dadaism, the nouveau roman, and the Oulipo....Roussel could have attempted to go the way of a popular writer like Rostand or of an avant-garde writer like Breton, but, both admirably and foolishly, he remained Roussel to the end.Originally published in 1914, Roussels extraordinary novel still feelsfresh more than a hundred years later... Both a guide to a derangedscientists estate and a prism for refracting Roussels diverse stories,this incredible novel is somehow both Gothic and modern at the sametime.There is hidden in Roussel something so strong, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness of the infinite spaces that frightened Pascal, that one feels the need for some sort of protective equipment when one reads him.Genius in its pure state. The Proust of dreams.Raymond Roussels works immediately absorbed me: I was taken by the prose style even before learning what was behind itthe process, the machines, the mechanismsand no doubt when I discovered his process and his techniques, the obsessional side of me was seduced a second time by the shock of learning of the disparity between this methodically applied process, which was slightly naive, and the resulting intense poetry.Like a retelling of Scheherazades 1,001 tales, but filteredthrough a character who fuses P. T. Barnum-style turn-of-the-centuryshowmanship with a Dr. Frankenstein-esque mad scientist mania, thesestories within a story are fascinating on their own but even more so inconcert with one another. And they act as the text which shadows(without fully obscuring) an alternative text, a treatise on obsessionand innovation, which always seems to bubble just below the dreamysurface.