Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Paris, Grasset
Description
"Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe - just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."" "This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine.""--BOOK JACKET.… (more)
Media reviews
Book World
If Cendrars felt anything steadily (beyond the urge to shift about and the compulsion to test his physical prowess) it was modern civilization pullulating all round him while he tried to wolf it down. Modernism flows into Moravagine's head like a sargasso from Hades; he cannot resist it, but,
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Canute-like, tries to, only to end up submitting completely to the destructive ecstasy it provokes in him. Moravagine is the man who ate Zeitgeist and died of it... Moravagine is a demented hymn to Creation, a seminal work in which a semi-gangster mentality anticipates many of the ironic-fantastic literary modes of our own day with a bumptious, carefully deployed bitingness no one has quite equalled.
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New Boston Review
Moravagine stakes out human extremity as its subject matter. The language is pained, exacerbated. Long, telescopic sentences carry us through revolution, terror, a zone of sexual and moral nihilism. To call the book depraved is to soft-pedal the issue. Nothing on that order, excepting Lautreamont,
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had appeared before. Moravagine seeks damnation and extinction with a glee unequaled in literature. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member richardderus
Book Circle Reads 17
Title: [MORAVAGINE]
Author: [[BLAISE CENDRARS]]
Rating: 3 sickened stars of five
The Book Description: At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an
This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."
My Review: Dr. Science, the eunuch-like shrink of mass-murdering rapist and all-around criminal Moravagine, relates this hideous tale of debauchery, rapine, pillage, murder, and all-around good times after springing the title character from the insane asylum where Science worked with him. Their world travels on the eve of the Great War involve blood, misery, and death for everyone but themselves.
Moravagine, literally “death by female genitalia,” is not someone you want to meet. Hannibal Lecter was positively cuddlesome by Moravagine's standards. Science, in his neutral and neutered language, presents the facts of their horrible, horrible crime spree in a way that left me nauseated but curiously unmoved: “Which mother would not prefer to kill and devour her children if she could be sure in doing so of binding to her and keeping her male, of being permeated by him, absorbing him from below, digesting him, letting him be macerated within her in a state reduced to that of foetus, and carrying him thus her life long in womb?”
This is a slasher movie waiting to happen. I've heard others describe it as funny. Not to me. Distastefully misogynistic. Appallingly bloody. I enjoyed one thing about reading the book: The author's evident fury and outrage at a world that tacitly accepts the dehumanizing and belittling effects of Modernity without so much as a bleat of resistance. Resistance, you see, is futile.
Revolting. Fascinating. Deeply unclean.
Title: [MORAVAGINE]
Author: [[BLAISE CENDRARS]]
Rating: 3 sickened stars of five
The Book Description: At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an
Show More
immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."
My Review: Dr. Science, the eunuch-like shrink of mass-murdering rapist and all-around criminal Moravagine, relates this hideous tale of debauchery, rapine, pillage, murder, and all-around good times after springing the title character from the insane asylum where Science worked with him. Their world travels on the eve of the Great War involve blood, misery, and death for everyone but themselves.
Moravagine, literally “death by female genitalia,” is not someone you want to meet. Hannibal Lecter was positively cuddlesome by Moravagine's standards. Science, in his neutral and neutered language, presents the facts of their horrible, horrible crime spree in a way that left me nauseated but curiously unmoved: “Which mother would not prefer to kill and devour her children if she could be sure in doing so of binding to her and keeping her male, of being permeated by him, absorbing him from below, digesting him, letting him be macerated within her in a state reduced to that of foetus, and carrying him thus her life long in womb?”
This is a slasher movie waiting to happen. I've heard others describe it as funny. Not to me. Distastefully misogynistic. Appallingly bloody. I enjoyed one thing about reading the book: The author's evident fury and outrage at a world that tacitly accepts the dehumanizing and belittling effects of Modernity without so much as a bleat of resistance. Resistance, you see, is futile.
Revolting. Fascinating. Deeply unclean.
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LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Where do I begin? With the deranged doctor or the blue Indians? But how can I forget the orang-outang? We meet these characters in the second half of the book after reading about Moravagine escaping from a nightmarish boyhood and a strange castle in the earlier parts of the ersatz memoirs.
What we
The main narrative is in a picaresque style narrated by a young doctor who frees the mysterious Moravagine from an asylum where he’s been imprisoned for many years. “Moravagine” is an adopted name whose origin and meaning is never addressed, although a French reader would find a rather unavoidable pun on “death by vagina”. Moravagine himself is an otherwise unnamed member of the Hungarian royal family, a dwarfish intellectual psychopath with a bad leg who goes on the run with the doctor, first to pre-revolutionary Russia, then to the United States and South America.
The prose seems coherent only in the sense that your dreams (at least mine) seem rational until you realize that they are really absurd. The author may have been writing his narrative in reaction to his own experience of the senselessness of the Great War where he lost his right arm. He spent about a decade from 1917 to 1926 writing this novel and Cendrars himself appears as a character in the later chapters; he has his narrator lose a leg while Moravagine loses his reason altogether. At the end of the book he’s found imprisoned in another asylum where he believes he’s an inhabitant of the planet Mars, and where he spends his last months writing a huge, apocalyptic account of how the world will be in the year 2013.
This is a short novel that is in turns comedic and absurd, not necessarily all at the same time. If you enjoy experimentation in the books that you read you will like Cendrars memorable reflections on the meaninglessness of (fictional) existence.
What we
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have with Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars is a novel that is difficult to summarize and, while written in the era of modern novels, seems almost post-modern in its organization. That is a structure I would compare with Nabokov's Pale Fire with its disparate sections of memoir, notes from the author, and other non-traditional bits of text, although the prose is nothing like Nabokov. Rather the prose is comparable to nightmarish narratives whether from Joris-Karl Huysmans or Franz Kafka.The main narrative is in a picaresque style narrated by a young doctor who frees the mysterious Moravagine from an asylum where he’s been imprisoned for many years. “Moravagine” is an adopted name whose origin and meaning is never addressed, although a French reader would find a rather unavoidable pun on “death by vagina”. Moravagine himself is an otherwise unnamed member of the Hungarian royal family, a dwarfish intellectual psychopath with a bad leg who goes on the run with the doctor, first to pre-revolutionary Russia, then to the United States and South America.
The prose seems coherent only in the sense that your dreams (at least mine) seem rational until you realize that they are really absurd. The author may have been writing his narrative in reaction to his own experience of the senselessness of the Great War where he lost his right arm. He spent about a decade from 1917 to 1926 writing this novel and Cendrars himself appears as a character in the later chapters; he has his narrator lose a leg while Moravagine loses his reason altogether. At the end of the book he’s found imprisoned in another asylum where he believes he’s an inhabitant of the planet Mars, and where he spends his last months writing a huge, apocalyptic account of how the world will be in the year 2013.
This is a short novel that is in turns comedic and absurd, not necessarily all at the same time. If you enjoy experimentation in the books that you read you will like Cendrars memorable reflections on the meaninglessness of (fictional) existence.
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LibraryThing member poetontheone
Is this a testament of exorcism of The Double? Perhaps. Or maybe just the outcome of an inescapable possession. Frederic Louis Sauser is possessed by Blaise Cendrars is possessed by Moravagine. All three are marked by war and filled with the ecstatic poisons of fantasy. This novel is nothing if not
Take an enjoyable romp with the merry doctor and mad Moravagine, freed from the captivity of an asylum, as they ransack Russia and swindle the revolution, fall prey to savagery of Indians, find fast fortune in the mega-industry of air travel, fall prey to the horrors of war, and record the 'kultur' of Mars. They rob, they maul, they screw, they, laugh, they cry. You laugh. For all it's debauchery, violence, vagrancy, inebriation, and misogyny. You laugh. You sick dog.
Kay-ray-kuh-kuh-ko-kex.
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the blackest of comedies.Take an enjoyable romp with the merry doctor and mad Moravagine, freed from the captivity of an asylum, as they ransack Russia and swindle the revolution, fall prey to savagery of Indians, find fast fortune in the mega-industry of air travel, fall prey to the horrors of war, and record the 'kultur' of Mars. They rob, they maul, they screw, they, laugh, they cry. You laugh. For all it's debauchery, violence, vagrancy, inebriation, and misogyny. You laugh. You sick dog.
Kay-ray-kuh-kuh-ko-kex.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
Doctor helps a homicidal lunatic, the title character, escape from an asylum, then becomes his companion on a worldwide tour of revolution, violence, homicide (of course), aviation, war, and a few other things. The narrator becomes more passive as the journey goes on, but Moravagine shows himself
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to be energetic, clever, thoroughly evil, and completely remorseless. The fun in this book comes from the imaginative circumstances and places the pair find themselves in. This is not quite the book I expected from the description on Amazon. Despite the subject matter, the book is far from disgusting or upsetting. At times, it almost reads like a real travelogue. It isn't easy to describe what a reader encounters here--but I recommend it to anyone looking for something completely different. In translation at least, it is a joy to read. Show Less
LibraryThing member BlackGlove
Kay-ray-kuh-kuh-ko-kex : the only word in the Martian language
A young physician with nihilistic leanings helps an "incurable" patient named Moravagine to escape from a lunatic asylum. Thereafter the two men embark on a globe-trotting escapade taking in, amongst other things, the Russian Revolution
This is a bold and entertaining novel written in a muscular style which is at once insightful, direct and, I suppose, pretty harsh in its outlook. Yes it could be said that, as a whole, it doesn't quite hang together - for instance: Moravagine's character seems to shift between Jack the Ripper, Quasimodo and Hugh Hefner, and sometimes he (Moravagine) appears to be tacked on as a freakish sideshow to the narrator's strange adventures and anarchistic thoughts.
All in all I'd define the novel as an intense, flamboyant and peculiar vision, flawed only by its untamed ambition.
A young physician with nihilistic leanings helps an "incurable" patient named Moravagine to escape from a lunatic asylum. Thereafter the two men embark on a globe-trotting escapade taking in, amongst other things, the Russian Revolution
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and World War I.This is a bold and entertaining novel written in a muscular style which is at once insightful, direct and, I suppose, pretty harsh in its outlook. Yes it could be said that, as a whole, it doesn't quite hang together - for instance: Moravagine's character seems to shift between Jack the Ripper, Quasimodo and Hugh Hefner, and sometimes he (Moravagine) appears to be tacked on as a freakish sideshow to the narrator's strange adventures and anarchistic thoughts.
All in all I'd define the novel as an intense, flamboyant and peculiar vision, flawed only by its untamed ambition.
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LibraryThing member theageofsilt
Not for the sensitive!
LibraryThing member Petroglyph
The narrator of this novel, freshly-graduated genius doctor Raymond la Science, lands a position at a renowned Swiss sanatorium for wealthy but criminally insane patients. This is where he meets one of the inmates, Moravagine, the last and very decrepit heir to a line of Central European nobility.
The first chapter was great! It hit me withan unexpected twist that boosted my confidence in having found a wild reading experience. Wild it was, but I don’t think the momentum was adequately sustained: some parts dragged too much (the Russian Revolution sections in particular), and others felt more incoherently tacked on. As the novel wears on, unity and structure become looser and cease to apply; this is particularly clear in the WWI segments and everything after. And while this is absolutely intentional, I don’t think the various sequences lead all that well into each other.
Moravagine is a very angry book: it’s furious at the mechanised slaughter of WWI and the indifference of modern technology and the kind of societies they have created. It has no faith in any of the Great Narratives either, and even raving anarchy and a primeval pleasure at tearing down society’s values are ultimately unfulfilling and hollow.
I cannot help but think that this book would translate exceptionally well to the big screen -- its story and aesthetic would be much better served in a largely visual medium. I think it would make for an awesome movie in the hands of Ben Wheatley (A field in England) or Robert Eggers (The VVitch: A New England folktale and The lighthouse).
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The rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire have put him away to solidify their hold on the throne -- but also because he’s a psychopathic murderer with a near-inhuman psyche. Raymond and Moravagine discover they are kindred spirits, and decide to break out. Joined together like a pair of parasites they travel the unstable world of the early 1900s, hiding under a variety of spy-level disguises, aliases and false passports. Wherever they are -- masterminding the Revolution in Russia, rafting up the Orinoco, witnessing The Great War -- Raymond develops his anarchistic ideas in his journal, and Moravagine leaves behind a trail of butchered girls. They feed off each other, and as their picaresque voyages become increasingly deranged, they themselves become more and more unhinged. The first chapter was great! It hit me with
Moravagine is a very angry book: it’s furious at the mechanised slaughter of WWI and the indifference of modern technology and the kind of societies they have created. It has no faith in any of the Great Narratives either, and even raving anarchy and a primeval pleasure at tearing down society’s values are ultimately unfulfilling and hollow.
I cannot help but think that this book would translate exceptionally well to the big screen -- its story and aesthetic would be much better served in a largely visual medium. I think it would make for an awesome movie in the hands of Ben Wheatley (A field in England) or Robert Eggers (The VVitch: A New England folktale and The lighthouse).
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LibraryThing member stillatim
A perfect "I'd rather talk about it than read it" book, which brings home to me once and for all how impossible it is to remain 'shocking' as history pro/regresses--like Celine, in that respect. And once the shockingness is gone, there's not a whole lot left to keep this thing together,
It does have, however, the greatest title in literature, and really, really does make a great conversation topic. We have our 'hero,' Moravagine, and his Robin, 'Dr. Science.' Voila: the two main twentieth century paths to amorality, the nihilistic and the scientistic. They travel the globe doing moderately shocking things. Moravagine causes the first Russian Revolution. He's a daring fighter pilot. He disembowels women.
More interesting by far is the apparatus Cendrars sets up around the picaresque: Moravagine's 'manuscripts,' the very hazy relationship between Blaise Cendrars and Dr. Science, Cendrars' reflections on writing the book. And some of the chapters are worth reading. "Our Rambles in America" is a kind of inverted "Education of Henry Adams," and the closing chapters (they take place after the world has, by creating the first world war, out moravagined Moravagine) are oddly moving.
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unfortunately. It does have, however, the greatest title in literature, and really, really does make a great conversation topic. We have our 'hero,' Moravagine, and his Robin, 'Dr. Science.' Voila: the two main twentieth century paths to amorality, the nihilistic and the scientistic. They travel the globe doing moderately shocking things. Moravagine causes the first Russian Revolution. He's a daring fighter pilot. He disembowels women.
More interesting by far is the apparatus Cendrars sets up around the picaresque: Moravagine's 'manuscripts,' the very hazy relationship between Blaise Cendrars and Dr. Science, Cendrars' reflections on writing the book. And some of the chapters are worth reading. "Our Rambles in America" is a kind of inverted "Education of Henry Adams," and the closing chapters (they take place after the world has, by creating the first world war, out moravagined Moravagine) are oddly moving.
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LibraryThing member baswood
Reading Moravagine, I was immediately reminded of Voltaire's [Candide]. However Moravagine is much much darker and if you read it with all the apparent seriousness in which it is written, not funny at all.
Blaise Cendrars was a Swiss naturalised French citizen; a poet and novelist who was
The narrator is Raymond la Science who as a young man of medical science sees an opportunity to release the madman and murderer Moravagine from an asylum in order to carry out further study. Moravagine is a very rich, last in line member of a noble family. He shows early signs of instability and is kept secured on a large estate. As a young boy he is betrothed to Rita, but is only allowed to see her once a year. When she arrives as a late adolescent woman, Moravagine murders her and he spends ten years locked away in a small cell, He keeps some sanity by focusing on his situation. Released by Raymond they move to London, but have to leave after Moravagine commits a number of brutal murders on women. Thy travel to Russia where Moravagine and Raymond become involved with the revolutionaries in 1907. Moravagine with his fortune and his ability to organise others, soon becomes a leader of the abortive 1907 coup in June. They are forced to flee and take ship to America, On the ship they befriend an Orang-u-tang (yes it starts to enter a world slightly touched by magic realism). Travels in America lead them to adventures on the frontier and needing to escape again they end up stranded on the Amazon river, where Morvagine becomes a god-like figure to a primitive tribe of Indians. They finally make it back to Paris where Moravagine becomes a pilot in the first world war.
It is a book on which I have hardly formed much of an opinion. As an exercise in modernist literature it can be admired, but there were only two parts that really grabbed my attention. The first was Moravagine's method of keeping his sanity while being locked up for years and the second was Raymond's experience with the Amazon tribe where he is a virtual prisoner in conditions where most Europeans would find it difficult to survive. The dream like states that both characters achieve pointed to a consideration as whether Moragavine was just the darker side of Raymond. It is a book that might benefit from a second reading, but I am not sure I can be bothered and so three stars.
Blaise Cendrars was a Swiss naturalised French citizen; a poet and novelist who was
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influential in the European modernist movement. Moravagine was originally published in 1926, but republished in 1956 with an explanation by the author on how and perhaps why he wrote the novel. It is a dark ride through the human (male) psyche. Warning misogyne is rife.The narrator is Raymond la Science who as a young man of medical science sees an opportunity to release the madman and murderer Moravagine from an asylum in order to carry out further study. Moravagine is a very rich, last in line member of a noble family. He shows early signs of instability and is kept secured on a large estate. As a young boy he is betrothed to Rita, but is only allowed to see her once a year. When she arrives as a late adolescent woman, Moravagine murders her and he spends ten years locked away in a small cell, He keeps some sanity by focusing on his situation. Released by Raymond they move to London, but have to leave after Moravagine commits a number of brutal murders on women. Thy travel to Russia where Moravagine and Raymond become involved with the revolutionaries in 1907. Moravagine with his fortune and his ability to organise others, soon becomes a leader of the abortive 1907 coup in June. They are forced to flee and take ship to America, On the ship they befriend an Orang-u-tang (yes it starts to enter a world slightly touched by magic realism). Travels in America lead them to adventures on the frontier and needing to escape again they end up stranded on the Amazon river, where Morvagine becomes a god-like figure to a primitive tribe of Indians. They finally make it back to Paris where Moravagine becomes a pilot in the first world war.
It is a book on which I have hardly formed much of an opinion. As an exercise in modernist literature it can be admired, but there were only two parts that really grabbed my attention. The first was Moravagine's method of keeping his sanity while being locked up for years and the second was Raymond's experience with the Amazon tribe where he is a virtual prisoner in conditions where most Europeans would find it difficult to survive. The dream like states that both characters achieve pointed to a consideration as whether Moragavine was just the darker side of Raymond. It is a book that might benefit from a second reading, but I am not sure I can be bothered and so three stars.
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LibraryThing member RickGeissal
Fun, wild, fascinating book with a worthwhile Forward that discloses some history and context to this 1926 novel. As an example, the name of the author is not really the author's name. This is well worth your time.
Awards
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1926
Local notes
III ed.