Word: baudelairean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Everyman who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul." As a corollary, he who accepts the conditions of life-as Genet accepts the worst life can dish out-presumably finds his soul. The discovery would disconcert most men. Genet indeed suggests that he has fulfilled the Baudelairean aspiration to "inspire universal horror and disgust." Few books are so thoroughly nasty and disquieting as Miracle of the Rose...
...stubbornly obscurantist prose falls the shadow of a story. Its central figure is Oliveira, one of a group of frayed Left Bank intellectuals who read Carson McCullers, play old Coleman Hawkins records and dither boozily about reality. Oliveira is a man suffering from "world-ache" and Baudelairean tastes; the two go together. He is later seen in Buenos Aires, where he has gone either to look for La Maga, whom he has lost, or for his own identity, which he has never found. In the company of old friends, he meanders through bohemia, with stops at a one-ring circus...
Wilson's Ripper is Austin Nunne, a Baudelairean esthete and homosexual sadist. Into his orbit drifts a would-be writer named Gerard Sorme, drawn to Nunne partly out of satanic excitement and partly because he seems to share the same ideas about what makes life not worth living. (Sorme is working on a book on "the modern sense of dispossession" that sounds remarkably like Wilson's Outsider.) With the help of "a Mozart symphony, a hot frankfurter sausage, the smell of acetone," Gerard sometimes gets "a new grip on being alive...