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Disaster Was My God: A Novel Of The Outlaw Life Of Arthur Rimbaud (2010)

by Bruce Duffy(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0385534361 (ISBN13: 9780385534369)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Doubleday

review 1: Bruce Duffy tells the story of Arthur Rimbaud, a french poet who was a 14-year-old prodigy. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Duffy attempts to answer the question many literary historians ask. Why did Rimbaud write his entire life’s work in 5 years and then turn his back to creative writing forever?This was an amazing novel for fan of the "drunken boat & a season in hell".. Disaster was My God is “an audaciously constructed, powerfully composed work that manages to create for the reader not simply the facts of Rimbaud’s life, but rather, the driving, almost insensate force that made those fact so alarming, so alluring.” Duffy “brilliantly reimagines the scandalous life of the pioneering, proto-punk poet Arthur Rimbaud.”
review 2: Chosen f... moreor a book group to groans of "a fictional biography? What does that even MEAN?" this book turned out to be interesting. It tells the story of Arthur Rimbaud, someone about whom I have no prior information. (I even had to ask someone how to pronounce his name.)Rimbaud, in case you don't know, had a brief but intense career as a poet in Europe before giving it all up and eventually landing in northern Africa as a tradesman making a fortune. During all that he had an affair with another poet, Paul Verlaine, who famously shot Rimbaud as the younger poet was leaving him. (At least that's what happened in this book.) When he became ill he went back to France and died shortly thereafter, leaving a mystery surrounding the abrupt advent of his talent and his equally abrupt exit from the word of letters.This book is like a fever dream, floating back and forth from his present, in which a dying Rimbaud is traveling across the African desert towards home, and his past, ranging from his difficult childhood on a French farm to his days as a hard-living poet in the capitals of Europe. Much of it has to do with the relationship with his mother, who might charitably be called a believer in tough love. VISCERAL is the word for many of the passages, like little snapshots of seedy underbelly among passages of poetic language.It's the sort of book made easier by occasionally letting your eyes glaze over and scan the text. Which sounds like a criticism, but isn't in this case. less

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