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 a clef (Aragon's friends, including Andre 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the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded.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 panorama of Paris society as its protagonist Anicet becomes subordinated to the mysterious Mire, a woman who is the incarnation of "modern Beauty." Anicet is seduced into a life of crime, which he accepts with nonchalance and an ironic integrity that he maintains to the bitter end of his journey of self-immolation. Aragon's precisely crafted, sardonic prose reveals a world that is no more than a tragic puppet show. This furious tempest of a book launched Aragon's career and is one the cornerstones of the Paris Dada movement.
Author
Louis Aragon was a major figure in the avant-garde movements that shaped French literary and visual culture in the 20th century. His long career as a poet, novelist, communist polemicist and bona-fide war hero, secured him his place in the pantheon of French literary greats. With André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, Aragon launched the Surrealist movement and through his 1926 novel, Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant), produced what is considered by most to be the movement's defining literary text. Having parted company with the movement in the early 1930s, Aragon devoted his energies to the French Communist Party and went on to produce a vast body of literature that combined elements of the avant-garde and social realism. Giving his voice and images to the art of France, Aragon was a leading influence on the shaping of the novel in the early to mid-twentieth century. He was also and an editor and a critic, being a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
