Friday 16 December 2011

Book review: 'Disaster Was My God' by Bruce Duffy

Another book review from my time at We Love This Book magazine. You can view the original here.

In Disaster Was My God, Bruce Duffy charts the meteoric rise and fall of 19th century poetic prodigy Arthur Rimbaud.
 
Born into the French peasantry, as a teenager Rimbaud was hailed as a literary genius on the basis of a handful of his poems. Yet by the age of 20 he had publicly renounced his works and absconded to Ethiopia to become an arms dealer, eventually returning to France diseased and disgraced.
 
To plot this bizarre career trajectory, Duffy eschews a chronological narrative in favour of jumping between key moments in the poet’s life: from the arid deserts of Ethiopia, to the decrepit villages of the French countryside and the seedy backstreets of Paris, where he seduces the older poet Paul Verlaine. He paints Rimbaud as a rebel in an era of conformity, seeking freedom at the farthest corners of the empire. Through his colourful descriptions and liberal doses of poetry, Duffy manages to capture the cultural and imperial spirit of the age.
 
The author takes relish in depicting a man whose life is a contradiction, a hedonistic genius whose impulsiveness is matched only by his lack of self-awareness. While the archetypes of the child-star turned to seed and his pushy, overbearing mother may be overly familiar to modern readers, there is fun to be had seeing them in a historical context.
 
Disaster Was My God is historical fiction at its best, a novel which uses vivid characterisation to bring the skeletons of the past back to life.

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