Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
Rimbaud, among the greatest of French poets, notorious for his life as well as his works, is evoked by a hugely distinguished biographer. Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, yet dramatically eventful and accomplished. His long poem "Un Saison d'Enfer" (1873) and his collection "Illuminations" (1886) are central to the modern canon. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while gun-running in Africa. He was thirty-seven.Distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White, brilliantly explores the young poet's relationships with his family and his teachers, as well as his notorious affair with the older and more established poet Paul Verlaine. He reveals the sometimes elusive, sometimes blatant, themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to this great and mercurial poet.
3.6 out of 5 based on 12 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
|
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-1843549710 |
| Publisher |
Atlantic |
| |
Rimbaud, among the greatest of French poets, notorious for his life as well as his works, is evoked by a hugely distinguished biographer. Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, yet dramatically eventful and accomplished. His long poem "Un Saison d'Enfer" (1873) and his collection "Illuminations" (1886) are central to the modern canon. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while gun-running in Africa. He was thirty-seven.Distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White, brilliantly explores the young poet's relationships with his family and his teachers, as well as his notorious affair with the older and more established poet Paul Verlaine. He reveals the sometimes elusive, sometimes blatant, themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to this great and mercurial poet.
Reviews
The Times
Peter Ackroyd
"This is a wonderful biography, filled with energy and life, driven as if by a lightning flash. It is also bolstered by fine literary criticism that is effortlessly introduced into the narrative of a quixotic life."
31/12/2008
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The Evening Standard
Ian Thompson
"White combines the scholarship of his biographies of Marcel Proust and Jean Genet with personal memoir. The result is a terse, precisely written work, which admirably captures the heady mix of the scatological, surreal and thoroughly modern in Rimbaud."
07/01/2009
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The Financial Times
Ángel Gurría-Quintana
"It is [his] personal connection to his subject’s tormented life that makes White’s biography so lively... The mostly spare and unaffected prose occasionally tips into modern vernacular. One of Rimbaud’s youthful poems is described as “a piece of soft-core kiddie porn”... Yet rather than alienating readers from the subject, such anachronisms bring immediacy to it... The biography skims, too briefly, over the later years of Rimbaud’s life, after he had forsaken literature, homosexuality and absinthe. White is more interested in Arthur, “the genius from hell”, than in Arthur the adventurous gun-runner."
12/01/2009
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The New Yorker
Books Briefly Noted
"Although White notes that “a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings,” his own account is slim and skillfully blends action and analysis. White declares his personal infatuation—even speculating that an affair with a teacher as “an unhappy gay adolescent” may have been inspired by Rimbaud’s example—but he is clearheaded about his idol’s shortcomings... White ultimately agrees with those of Rimbaud’s acquaintance who saw him not “as an angel or a devil but as an obnoxious boor.”"
08/12/2008
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The Economist
The Economist
"Two things set Mr White’s book apart from other Rimbaud biographies. First is the extent to which he identifies with his hero. Second, and more significant, is his emphasis on the relationship with Verlaine, to the extent that the book reads almost as a dual biography. Verlaine’s poetry is too often overlooked by admirers of the older man’s more charismatic and innovative protégé."
09/10/2008
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The Sunday Times
Kevin Jackson
"White retells this unparalleled story in a lucid, easy style; he retains in maturity something of the manner of a boyish fan, and his sympathy for Rimbaud, particularly in his late years of exile and loneliness, is often quite moving. At less than 200 pages of fairly large type, it makes a good, lively introduction. But that's about it."
04/01/2009
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The Independent
Michael Arditti
"White makes a good case for the power and originality of his writing. If it is true that poetry is what is lost in translation, that is more so in the case of prose poems. Little of the intensity of Rimbaud's two great works, "A Season in Hell" and "Illuminations", comes across in the truncated translations here. White's literary judgments are generally sound, although this reader searched in vain for evidence that the couplet, "I strummed the aces of my run-down shoes/Like harp strings, one foot against my heart", celebrates the joys of masturbation."
13/02/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Tim Martin
"...a sensitive, succinct and largely non-partisan account, heavy on the story and especially good for non-French-speakers... Towards the end, White pays tribute to Graham Robb's Rimbaud (2000) as the best English-language biography of the poet, and his own book does nothing to unseat it. But for Rimbaud novices...this pocket biography provides an excellent way into the life of one of literature's great enigmas."
25/01/2009
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The Literary Review
Belinda Jack
"[A] deft and racy new biography... The flip side of the rapid pulse of White’s writing is a degree of carelessness. Some French titles of poems and collections are translated into English, some are not, and it’s not just a matter of the reader’s likely knowledge of French... This is a short, punchy book and a lively read for those who enjoy the biographer’s style. I’m not convinced that Rimbaud’s was a ‘double life’..."
01/03/2009
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The New York Times
Richard Hell
"This biography by Edmund White is the digest version. If you’re casually curious about the fuss made over Rimbaud and want the lowdown from someone literate, it will satisfy you, without badly misleading... Still, this book irritates a bit with some of its complacent assertions, such as that Rimbaud’s famous declaration (in a letter written at age 16), “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”), “meant that in the act of introspection we objectify the self, we experience our self as if it belongs to another person,” which takes banality to the point of distortion."
15/01/2008
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The Observer
James Purdon
"In concentrating on the gossip through which the symbolist poet became himself a symbol...it risks diminishing the admirable, myth-breaking work done by Graham Robb's 2000 biography..."The only person who couldn't see his faults - or who delighted in them - was Verlaine."...here it's difficult not to see the biographer himself as a latter-day Verlaine, overwhelmed by the irreverence of the beautiful boorish boy, while everyone else looks on, perplexed."
15/02/2009
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The Guardian
Charles Nicholl
"The brevity of White's book is no bad thing in itself - length is no guarantee of biographical merit - but there are inevitable sins of omission. This is particularly the case with the later years (nearly half of Rimbaud's life), where he skates over some of the most mysterious and obliquely poetic incidents in Rimbaud's career. White writes in the crisp, laconic style which serves so well in his fiction, but which makes for a rather colourless account of this lurid, difficult and ultimately tragic young poet and adventurer."
17/01/2009
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