The adventures of Telemachus

This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon’s 1922 novel boldly appropriates the title and plot of a didactic 17th-century epic, recounting the adventures of Odysseus’ son Telemachus; but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealist’s dedication to the strange, the beautiful, and the erotic. Though a classic of Surrealism, this is not automatic writing; on the contrary, it is a wryly self-conscious book, full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the Huberts comment in their Introduction, “Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises; but by mastering and playing with the narrative… he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism… descend[ing] into the diabolical nirvana of dada.”