The Adventures of Telemachus

About this book

Retelling the adventures of Odysseus son Telemachus through the Surrealist lens of the strange and the marvelous This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragons 1922 novel boldly appropriates the title and plot of a didactic 17th-century epic recounting the adventures of Odysseus son Telemachus; but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealists dedication to the strange the beautiful and the erotic. Though a classic of Surrealism this is not automatic writing; on the contrary it is a wryly self-conscious book full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the Huberts comment in their introduction Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises; but by mastering and playing with the narrative he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism descending into the diabolical nirvana of Dada.