Rimbaud Book

Arthur Rimbaud was a extraordinary figure, a man who in his teenage year s wrote poetry that is arguably amongst the greatest in French Literature, but who gave it all up by his early 20s and went to Africa to run guns. It's hard to think of a more fascinating figure from the 19th century, or one more relevant to the youth-icon-fixated present. Robb's biography inhabits the superlative mode: Rimbaud has been "one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century literature", a spiritual soulmate to Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain. "For many readers (including this one)", he confesses, "the revelation of Rimbaud's poetry is one of the decisive events of adolescence". The poet's letter to his old teacher in 1871 (in which he famously asserted that "je est une autre"--"I is somebody else") is "one of the most important aesthetic texts" of the age. In 1873 Rimbaud was shot in the arm by his lover Verlaine; the bullet was extracted by the police surgeon. "If it ever emerges from a police archive", Robb asserts, "it will probably become one of the holiest relics in modern literature". It's possible to imagine that some readers may find this energetic a little outré, but at the least all this authorial excitement has the zing of authenticity; Robb convinces you that Rimbaud's work does really matter. If you don't already possess a copy of his poetry, reading this fizzingly brilliant biography will compel you to go out and purchase one at once. And Robb's work has all the scholarly virtues of solid research and a detailed sense of time and place. But the real genius of this book is that it encourages the reader to enter imaginatively into the hectic intensity of Rimbaud's short life so completely that even the subject's out-and-out obnoxiousness--stabbing his friends with knives, breaking marriages, sponging off all and sundry, being utterly unreliable and drinking himself into the grave--seem like radical acts of anti-bourgeois revolution. Rimbaud's philosophy of "scummification" ("je m'encrapule!" he declared), which meant that he washed neither himself nor his clothes, and deliberately sought out a life at the very bottom of society, was more than an adolescent cussedness. This book is a triumph. --Adam RobertsRead More