I did not like it as much as I thought I would. It has been a highlight among surrealists and I am all for surrealism, but this book was almost agony to get through. It is extremely well written and extraordinarily imaginative although there are parts of it that are deeply perverted. ( )

How in the world am I supposed to rate this one? Often clever use of language, brilliant snark, and righteous rage—but said rage is just as frequently uncontrolled and (I can't put it in any more satisfying fashion) unhelpful/irredeemable. That may well have been the author's intent, so...

This is poised between moustache-twirling gothic and surrealism avant la lettre. (It's the original source of Duchamp's chance encounter of the sewing machine and umbrella on operating table, and an avowed influence also on Artaud, Dalí, others). Maldoror is some kind of planeswalker who spends his time murdering beautiful young men, having sex with sharks, and kicking the shit out of God in weird, cartoonishly vulgar ways, like he sees God coming down the street but then God realizes the street is a giant snake that Maldoror left there in wait for him and the snake squeezes God until his eyes burst and then Maldoror has sex with his butt till he screams. No, okay, it's really not all butts, but in the anarchic mojo here, I'm still gonna revise and say this is poised between moustache-twirling gothic, surrealism avant la lettre, and Chuck Tingle, author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt. It's the Tingle spirit applied to a Satanic antihero with a heaping dose of bright lucid nightmares for fuel. It's one of the most incredible things I've read, and I don't esteem it more only because of the deep expanse of its viciousness--a lot of this is just torture porn, and I seem to have little tolerance for that kind of stuff these days no matter how pretty and pink the flayed quivering flesh is. ( )

Maldoror, which greatly influenced the Surrealist movement when a copy was discovered on an old shelf, is full of imagery and poetic ranting, some of it completely random (a man with a pelican-head with a dung beetle for instance, or god's enormous pubic-hair) all meant to shock and affect the reader in some way. My personal favorite section was the hermaphrodite, in which Lautreamont sketches the life of such a person as one would an angel. It brilliantly stands out amidst the chapters of monsters and Maldoror's ambivalence towards mankind.