Arthur's Whims

ARTHUR'S WHIMS is the tale of a modern saint, a love story born of a childhood dream of being alone on a boat with a boy, a friend. Arthur and his beloved Bichon -- a young man who, after drinking Arthur's tears, becomes pregnant with his child -- drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Daniel Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert's essay The Bear, in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: Arthur's Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be. It is a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.

How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste -- let alone one so prescient -- remain untranslated and unread?

-- Parul Sehgal, NY Times