The Songs of Maldoror

The book opens by warning you off: turn back now, it says, unless your nerve can survive what follows. Comte de Lautréamont's Maldoror ignores its own warning and pulls you through anyway, canto after canto, narrated by a being who wars on God, tortures the innocent for sport, and one night in a storm finds his truest kin not in any man but in a shark, and couples with it in the waves, two monsters recognizing their own cruelty in each other. The sentences run for pages without slowing, piling atrocity on rapture on blasphemy until they arrive, almost incidentally, at the image that would later detonate a whole art movement: beauty defined as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Isidore Ducasse was twenty-two when he began writing this under a name for a man who never existed, and dead within three years, in a Paris under siege, before it found a single reader. What survived him is too extreme to be safe and too beautiful to look away from.