Grabinoulor: v. 1

Pierre Albert-Birot was one of the seminal figures of the modern movement in France. As editor of (one of) the earliest avant-garde reviews SIC, he published most of the futurists, the (future) Dadaists and Surrealists, and many others - and Grabinoulor made his first appearance in its pages.Like his creator, Grabinoulor was only rediscovered in the last few decades. The book was perhaps neglected because its astonishing formal inventiveness is overwhelmed by an entirely joyous and undespairing outlook which was at total variance with the other literature of the time (1919) . "Grabinoulor is the happiest man in the world;" he is also very Parisian, all-powerful, childlike, satiric, eternally optimistic; his picaresque adventures happen to him in all times and in all places, he is rather forgetful . . . Barbara Wright has triumphantly overcome the problems of translating a remarkable work that has been praised by authors as different as Apollinaire, Celine, Jacob, Queneau, and Sollers. "To the reader willing to admit the existence of joy, Grabinoulor and his life and opinions are pure delight."(Times Literary Supplement) . "Grabinoulor has no personal characteristics except an imperturbable appetite for all kinds of pleasure, and a mind rarely paralleled for energy and inventiveness. He is everyone and no one. . . . Anyone who loves Tristram Shandy will love Grabi."(Sunday Times) . "It has been called a masterpiece, as if a work could qualify as such when it's only just been born. A work isn't born a masterpiece, it becomes one. And yet it's saying a lot of a book to call it at the same Gay, living, contemporary (I don't like the word modern) , intelligent, fantastic, poetic, realistic, daring, more than daring, psychological, synthetic, symbolic, simple, classic, universal, surprising, bizarre, banal, larger than life, true to life and even true to experience, attractive, odious, pessimistic, optimistic, serious, humorous and even more than humorous."(Max Jacob in Les Nouvelles litteraires) . "Joyously erotic. . . .The irrepressible Grabinoulor performs his fantastic epic feats in an onrush of perpetual motion, which this slim book presents in rivers of unpunctuated prose. . . . Albert-Birot celebrated the erotic as a means of freeing the artistic imagination from bourgeois constraints. For him, sexuality represented poetic creation. His tricks of language, his leaps through time and space are in the tradition of Rabelais and Shandy. The ribaldry does not shock not as it once perhaps did, but Grabinoulor is still fun to read. The book is a valuable document in the development of Dada and surrealism."(Publishers Weekly 1/23/87) . "Ingenious imagination. . . . This fine translation of the Grabinoulor saga deserves reading as a genuine sample of the modernism that its author nurtured in SIC, and that cleared the path for the likes of Cocteau, Breton, and Ionesco."(Choice Jul-Aug '87)