Anicet or the Panorama: A Dadaist Novel - Hardcover

by Louis Aragon (Author), Antony Melville (Translator), Antony Melville (Introduction by)

This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English War poets. In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman clef (Aragon's friends, including Andr Breton, are recognizable), and a novel of the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded. As fast-paced, funny and surprising as a Hollywood silent movie, its narrative of fabulous crimes and scandals sweeps through a panorama of Paris society as its protagonist Anicet becomes subordinated to the mysterious Mire, a woman who is the incarnation of "modern Beauty." Anicet is seduced into a life of crime, which he accepts with nonchalance and an ironic integrity that he maintains to the bitter end of his journey of self-immolation.