Bruce Duffy's Novel about Rimbaud, Disaster Was My God

Twenty-four years ago Bruce Duffy published his first novel, The World as I Found It, about Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to great reviews and a subsequent NYRB re-release with an introduction by David Leavitt. Ten years later an autobiographical second novel fizzled. Now comes his third, Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud, and much like his mercurial subject, the reviews are either a day in heaven or a season in hell. 

Writing for the Boston Globe, Richard Eder finds the book "astonishing" and says "the feverish atmosphere Duffy uses to create the high-charged intensity of his characters. The trek and the desert passages are breathlessly absorbing; the adorned texture of Duffy’s writing becomes addictive. Among other things, Disaster is the rare example of a page-turner whose pages are richly weighted."

In this week's New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn admires Duffy's portrayal of the poet's mother but says, "More problematic, inevitably, is the representation of Rimbaud himself. The interior of an artist’s mind is notoriously difficult to represent on the page. Although Duffy has some nice evocations of the boy-poet’s “cycloning brain,” they feel as if they come from outside the organ in question, rather than from within; too often, the author has to fall back on the ungainly device of interjecting reminders of Rimbaud’s greatness. (“What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?”) This cheerleading gets wearisome—as do some misfired attempts at freshening the period drama with contemporary locutions: “Two-seat fat,” “cooties of feeling.”

Mendelsohn's essay is a larger think piece on Rimbaud and why he stopped writing at twenty, incorporating John Ashbery's poems and Graham Robb's biography and this take on the tiger-sex tumult with Verlaine:

"Many readers and biographers see the couple as what one critic calls 'the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality,' but the evidence suggests that, as far as Rimbaud was interested in anyone other than himself, he was interested primarily in women. (Later, in Abyssinia, he lived with a strikingly good-looking local woman; she wore Western clothes and smoked cigarettes, while he wore native costume.) It is hard to escape the feeling that Verlaine, an ugly man whose appearance Rimbaud made cruel jokes about, was a kind of science experiment for the poet..."

Duffy recently penned a piece for The Daily Beast about the novelist's problems with an unsympathetic protagonist, "When Your Hero's an SOB."

Comments

[justin bieber supra]

I like the writing structure of your blog and it does a pretty decent job of presenting the material.