The first of Roussel’s two major prose works,
Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an
unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth
chapter.
A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel’s groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.
________
'An imagination which joins the mathematician’s delirium to the poet’s logic – this, among other marvels, is what one discovers in the novels of Raymond Roussel.'
Raymond Queneau
________
Read an excerpt from
Impressions Of Africa
By the same author: