Book Review: "Maldoror and Poems" by Comte de Lautréamont

Have you ever read something that has made you scrunch your nose up in disgust a little? Something that has made you rather uncomfortable? I'm not talking about the way Stephen King scares the life out of you or how HP Lovecraft creeps you out, I'm not talking about the way Shirley Jackson sends you crazy or Daphne Du Maurier sets you on edge - I'm talking about something that makes you feel like: "huh, that's fairly uncomfortable..." Something that makes you shift in you seat a bit and furrows your brow in confusion and think that you're probably not going to be reading this one to relax. Welcome to Maldoror and Poems - a book that was supposedly penned whilst its author was sitting at a piano in rented accomodation, in an inn somewhere. But those accounts can't be verified...

We start off with a narrator who warns us about continuing with the book. He tells us that he is cruel and evil, but doesn't lie to himself or others about it. He is quite open about how mad and dangerous he is and how little he thinks of the state of the world. There are some scenes where you definitely think that there is something morally wrong with the narrator but he's already said that he isn't going to lie to us. But he slowly goes from the idea of creating a smile in the style of the Joker from The Dark Knight to something evil and vampiric straight out of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is quite uncomfortable yes, but it isn't entirely unexpected if you've read the previous sections properly. As you can see, extracts one and two are close together in the text...

I read some of the most depressing lines I've read in a long time. Images of the dangers of the sea and digging one's own grave litter the text as we are forced to imagine what life is like for this horrified narrator who is most definitely both sick of his own existence and feels he is the most cruel person ever. I'm not going to lie, sometimes I definitely related to some of the more depressing passages. Early on in the book they are few and far between, but as we get deeper into it, there are definitely more.

Apart from the constantly strange, murderous, depressive and often distressing language, the story is an incoherent mixture of 'songs' in which automated writing may play a huge part. As we go through the book even more, we begin to see the emotions of the writer unfold in gruesome images such as imagined copulation with a shark. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to say about this but there's a lot of gruesome images in this book. If you're not ready to be thoroughly disgusted and depressed then I would suggest steering clear of this one. Even the writer himself states that the reader will be startled and shocked by the contents of the text and he wants you to experience it all.

"The poetic whines of this century are nothing but sophisms"

- The Poems

I thought I was the misanthrope of the literary world - but here we are. There is probably more madness, depravity and depression in this section than there is in the first as the writer speaks of afflictions of being human and the "dead illusions" we are encompassed within.

"Your mind is perpetually unhinged, lured into, and trapped inside the darknesses created by the crude art of egoism and amour-propre..."

There's an existential and nihilistic truth to it that fits perfectly with the ideals of the misanthrope that the poet is projecting. I personally, quite loved it because there was so much of it that I related to. Historical figures, writers and various professions litter the text in order for the writer to make his maddening point in which he continuously professes how humanity has gone oh so wrong and how beauty should be appreciated. But then again, there are people who have twisted its very meaning and thus, destroyed it.

"Communicate to your readers only the experience of sorrow, which is not the same as sorrow itself. Do not cry in public."

I finished this book with a thought about intellect, existentialism and the idea of the misanthrope because I was also just reading a study about how misanthropes may not be as intelligent as they think they are (which I think is a lie since the very nature of a misanthrope means that they probably don't have the kind of ego in which they think they are very intelligent at all). I've been left reeling from the language so much though that I may have to reread this book in order to decide that entirely. I am thus, undecided.

"All the water in the sea would not be enough to wash away one intellectual bloodstain."