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The First Book of GrabinoulorAuthor: Pierre Albert-Birot Translator: Barbara Wright French Literature Series March 2000 99 pages, 6 x 9 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-245-X Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $8.76—20% OFF! 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $16.00—20% OFF! Hardcover Temporarily Out of Stock |
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Book Description
Like its author, Grabinoulor has been rediscovered only in the last few decades. Originally published in SIC in 1919 and praised by such writers as Apollinaire, Celine, Max Jacob, and Raymond Queneau, it did not appear in English until 1986.
Smart, joyous, playfully philosophical and completely without despair, the novel follows the character Grabinoulor—"the happiest man in the world"—a child-like, satyric, and comical Parisian as he visits other planets, travels through time, and finds poetry wherever he goes.
About the Author
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A key figure in France's modernist movement, Pierre Albert-Birot founded and edited SIC—an early-20th century avant-garde literary magazine—where he published and helped to shape the work of fellow Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists (including Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and the first texts of Tristan Tzara). |
About the Translator
| Barbara Wright has translated several Queneau novels; indeed, as John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, she "has waltzed around the floor with the Master so many times by now that she follows his quirky French as if the steps were in English." She has also translated works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras. She lives in London. |
Praise
"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."&mdashPublishers Weekly"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
"To the reader willing to admit the existence of joy, Grabinoulor and his life and opinions are pure delight."—Times Literary Supplement