The Salt Smugglers
$35.35
- Paperback
147 pages
- Release Date
15 December 2014
Summary
First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France’s short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true his…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780980033069 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0980033063 |
| Author: | Gerard de Nerval |
| Publisher: | Archipelago Books |
| Imprint: | Archipelago Books |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 147 |
| Release Date: | 15 December 2014 |
| Weight: | 248g |
| Dimensions: | 216mm x 135mm |
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Critics Review
If ever a writer … sought to define himself painstakingly to himself, to grasp and bring light to the murky shadings, the deepest laws and most elusive impressions of the human soul, it was G
If ever a writer … sought to define himself painstakingly to himself, to grasp and bring light to the murky shadings, the deepest laws and most elusive impressions of the human soul, it was Gérard de Nerval. —Marcel Proust
Every intelligent English-speaking reader must be grateful to Richard Sieburth and Archi- pelago Books for rescuing from oblivion this gem of factual fiction, revealing a Nerval poised somewhere between the subversive Diderot and the vitriolic Voltaire. The Salt Smugglers now has pride of place in my ideal library. —Alberto Manguel
The octrois of reason exact a cruel tithe compounded of the flesh and blood of mankind. The arbitrary authority of fate casts our lives into Bastilles far more terrible than those stormed by revolutions. This is why we so love and admire all those salt smugglers of the spirit, all those bootleggers of contraband ideas who thumb their noses at the black-shirted guards of narrow logic. —Michel Leiris
About The Author
Gerard de Nerval
Poet, storyteller, autobiographer, translator, and visionary, Gerard de Nerval (1808-55) explored the blurry boundaries between dream and reality, fact and fiction, imagination and madness in his groundbreaking writings. Nerval was a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists, and a vital influence on writers such as Marcel Proust, Andre Breton, and Antonin Artaud. His works include Voyage en Orient ( Journey to the Orient), Sylvie - which Umberto Eco deemed a “masterpiece,” Les Filles du Feu (The Daughters of Fire), Les Illumines (The Illuminati), and Aurelia - which opens with “Dream is a second life.” Richard Sieburth’s translations include Gerard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Friedrich H lderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gerard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers, Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s The Fullness of Time- Poems. His edition of Nerval’s Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Sc ve’s Delie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.
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