Alfred Jarry’s Speculations

A review by Conor Hultman for The Local Voice, Oxford, Mississippi

Conor Hultman has reviewed R J Dent’s modern English translation of Alfred Jarry’s Speculations for The Local Voice, based in Oxford, Mississippi.

The review can be read here: http://www.thelocalvoice.net/oxford/book-review-by-conor-hultman-speculations-by-alfred-jarry/

The book details and links are here: https://blackscatbooks.com/2022/03/23/jarry-lives/

and here: http://www.rjdent.com/speculations-alfred-jarry-translated-into-english-by-r-j-dent/

Alfred Jarry spent his brief and turbulent life experimenting with genres of fiction. In his last few years, he created a new fictional form: the absurdist speculative essay. R J Dent’s new English translation of Speculations contains 68 of Jarry’s essays, originally printed between 1901 and 1904 as a series, ‘Spéculations’, in the French journal Le Revue Blanche.

In Jarry’s darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces, the renowned author deploys his characteristic satirical eye and dark humor to devastating effect. These essays range in tone from the wildly comic to the deeply tragic and cover a diversity of subjects, ranging from French Trees to Cannibalism. For Jarry, nothing is sacred; everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind.

A series of sly investigations into fin de siècle France that reads like a beautiful & bloody
handful of paper cuts, splintered essays that turn authority on its head in sharp bursts of
wicked logic, R J Dent elegantly capturing Jarry’s iconoclastic spirit, his scandalous heart.
—Matthew Kinlin