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Moravagine (New York Review Books Classics)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9781590170632
ISBN: 1590170636
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: August 31, 2004
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: August 31, 2004
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Review:
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Exquisitely depraved travelogue
This may be described as an exquisitely depraved travelogue of regions both geographic and psychological. Other reviewers have more than adequately laid out the storyline and in that regard I have nothing to add. I will simply admonish readers that this is not a book for the queasy, the timid, or those of a markedly nervous disposition. That said, if you took pleasure from Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, J.K. Huysmans' A Rebours (Against Nature), or, stretching a bit, even the fantastical ... Read More
Rating:  - masculine violence in the face of absurdity
i'm sure i'll lose my membership card as a nihilist, but i found this book to be a waste of my time. the characters are tiresome in their quest for life, the title character always committing acts of violence for no reason, usually against women, while the character documenting Moravagine is obviously utterly in love with him.
like others i'm sure i was drawn to Cendrars because of Henry Miller's recommendation, but i am disappointed. i have recently found a number of books of this negative ... Read More
Rating: - Voyage Surprise
"The Prose of the Trans-Siberian" poem remains my favorite piece of Cendrars writing but this novel is a close second. I passed my copy around and everyone that had a go at it praised the thrills it delivers. Cendrars is a character who seems to have known everyone and been everywhere during those wild experimental years at the beginning of the last century. He documented his many careers(he had a go at just about every art form) in four volumes of biography. Three of which I think are available. He ... Read More
Rating:  - Sickness unto death
As one commentator has said, this disturbing book, with its two anarchist lead characters, is Cendrars' view of the artistic process, viewed from the destructive perspective; to recall Michael Bakunin (1814-76), "The passion for destruction is also a constructive passion," a famous utterance which is like a watermark behind everything which occurs in _Moravagine_.
There is no fun or point in giving away the picaresque plot of this extraordinary work. I have no idea how this reads in the original ... Read More
Rating: - unfathomable brilliance !!!
This was the first book I read from Cendrars with little thought that he would have the humbling effect on me that he did. To say this book is great, is an understatement! After you've read it ,you too, will understand why! The amount of reaserch that had to be applied to this book is an amazing feat in itself, let alone the whole storyline which is genius, complex,and poetic,... like all the great authors! Moravogine...A psychological thrilling novel that confronts bare human emotion with an honesty unmatched ... Read More
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