One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, Lautreamont's fantasy unveils a world - half-vision, half-nightmare - of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace, and the startling imagery - delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns - possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality. The writer's mysterious life and death, no less than the book itself, captured the imagination of surrealists, Jarry, Modigliani, Verlaine and others hailed it as a work of genius.
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