Novel
Locus Solus
Locus solus
Raymond Roussel · 1914
Opening lines
Ce jeudi de commençant avril, mon savant ami le maître Martial Canterel m'avait convié, avec quelques autres de ses intimes, à visiter l'immense parc environnant sa belle villa de Montmorency.
On that Thursday at the beginning of April, my learned friend Master Martial Canterel had invited me, with a few others of his intimates, to visit the immense park surrounding his fine villa at Montmorency.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
The scholar Martial Canterel shows a few colleagues round the park of his estate and displays his inventions, increasingly strange, telling the story of each. An aerial rammer, suspended from a balloon, composes a mosaic of human teeth in the ground. Further on, in a vast glass cage, the dead, revived by a fluid of his own invention, resurrectine, endlessly replay a crucial moment of their lives.
Context
The book was published by Alphonse Lemerre, dated 1914; the colophon gives 24 October 1913. It has no continuous plot: the visit to the park moves from one invention to the next, and each calls for the story that explains it. Its construction follows a method based on almost identical words taken in different senses, which the author set out only in a book published after his death. Ignored when it appeared, it came to matter for the Surrealists, the nouveau roman and the Oulipo.
Who it is for
A novel without suspense, in which each chapter describes a machine and then its history; the tone remains neutral and precise from beginning to end.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English under its title by Rupert Copeland Cuningham in 1970, the book was reissued in 2017 by New Directions.
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