Anicet or the Panorama - A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon

Anicet or the Panorama - A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, translated by Antony Melville / ISBN 9781900565691 / 208-page hardback, 6.9 x 7.8 inches, published by Atlas Press *** This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon (1897–1982) was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English War poets. In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman à clef (Aragon’s friends, including André Breton, are recognizable), and a novel of the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded. As fast-paced, funny and surprising as a Hollywood silent movie, its narrative of fabulous crimes and scandals sweeps through a p