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Aurélia

Gérard de Nerval,

Monique Di Donna (Translator)

3.92 · Rating details · 1,497 ratings · 91 reviews

An autobiographical fiction of major appeal.

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Paperback, 160 pages

Published May 1st 2000 by Green Integer (first published 1855)

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Jun 06, 2017 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Every man is a reflection of the world…

The macrocosm, or greater world, was constructed by cabbalistic arts; the microcosm, or smaller world, is its image reflected in every heart.

Gérard de Nerval descends into his madness to find there Aurélia like Orpheus descends into Tartarus to find Eurydice. And the insanity becomes Gérard de Nerval’s underworld…

I entered a huge hall where many persons were assembled. I recognized familiar faces everywhere. The features of relatives whose deaths I had mour

...more

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May 14, 2008 Eddie Watkins rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: surrealist metaphysicians

Shelves: french-fiction, memoirs-letters-interviews, poetry-19th-century

Aurelia is a non-fictional account of Nerval's "descent into hell", perhaps precipitated by the death of an actress he was obsessed/in love with. During this descent he is beseiged with visions, both waking and sleeping, of universal love and unity and universal desolation. He is also beseiged by his own Catholic guilt for seriously dabbling in the occult for the purposes of figuring out these very visions. These conflicts entangled him in a significant psychic bind and landed him in an asylum, ...more

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Jan 12, 2008 Kimley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Proust fans, dreamers, escapists, the mentally unstable

Shelves: 19th-century, french

I suspect that most of us have some kind of reality escape hatch that removes us from the inevitable difficulties both large and small of everyday existence. Whether it's religion, drugs/alcohol, reading too many books (!!!), there's another world outside the one we experience with our five senses that most of us look to in order to survive this one. The majority of us can delineate between the "real" world and the "other" world we imagine but there are those for whom the line between these worl I suspect that most of us have some kind of reality escape hatch that removes us from the inevitable difficulties both large and small of everyday existence. Whether it's religion, drugs/alcohol, reading too many books (!!!), there's another world outside the one we experience with our five senses that most of us look to in order to survive this one. The majority of us can delineate between the "real" world and the "other" world we imagine but there are those for whom the line between these worlds becomes less and less defined. Nerval is one of those people whose "other" world became his "real" world. And while it's clear it ultimately gave him much pain (he ended up taking his own life), it leaves us with this beautifully ethereal book that takes us into his self-created alternate universe.

Written while institutionalized or shortly thereafter (I'm not clear on this), we get a look into a strange amalgam of other worlds that his mind takes him to. Some are beautiful and reassuring where he is reconnected with departed loved ones and taken to beautiful landscapes. Other times, he goes to places dark and terrifying and it's clear he's having doubts about the existence of a Christian heaven. On a spiritual quest, he looks to not only the Christian God but Greek, Roman and Egyptian gods, as well as simply looking to the stars for some sign, any sign that there is something more. He'll take it wherever he can conjure it up.

Escaping to these other worlds becomes a kind of addiction for him and he loses all interest in the "real" world. The book begins with a seemingly realistic narrative about lost love and slowly bleeds into his imaginary world where it's difficult to tell if he is relating true events or imaginary dreams. Eventually it becomes irrelevant because you just feel privileged to have access to this mysterious man's mind.

Written in a dream-state, stream-of-consciousness style in the 1850's considerably ahead of his time, it's obvious why he was so influential to the surrealists and other writers of the early 20th century such as Proust.

"My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of these joys?..."

Indeed! Who needs reason when you can read this book! ...more

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Oct 09, 2020 Fergus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I AM A WIDOWER IN A BLACK CLOUD,
THE PRINCE OF AQUITAINE IN HIS RUINED TOWER.
Gérard de Nerval, after his collapse.

Awakening is a bitter ordeal to some, in not the least of whose ranks we may number de Nerval.

Like many of the French poètes maudits, his previous life had been a dream - until the day Aurélie capsized his bateau ivre.

Life’s not a dress rehearsal.

It’s for real.

And many of our friends and associates are playing hardball.

‘Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus?’

If you don’t know the answer to that ...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Nate D rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2016, 19th-century, oneirics, proto-surrealism, france

As recommended by Rene Daumal, various Surrealists, and others. The title story is actually less fully dream-like than expected, but actually more a personal account of ones own descent into and intermittent recovery from insanity. In that sense, it does fit in well with various Surrealist's acounts of their own periods of delusion (Unica Zurn's The Man of Jasmine and Leonora Carrington's Down Below are key examples of this genre), while looking ahead to some of the oneiric accounts in fictions As recommended by Rene Daumal, various Surrealists, and others. The title story is actually less fully dream-like than expected, but actually more a personal account of ones own descent into and intermittent recovery from insanity. In that sense, it does fit in well with various Surrealist's acounts of their own periods of delusion (Unica Zurn's The Man of Jasmine and Leonora Carrington's Down Below are key examples of this genre), while looking ahead to some of the oneiric accounts in fictions of the mid-century (Anna Kavan's 1948 Sleep Has His House or Doris Lessing's somehow more dated 1970s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell). All of which company should suggest that I'd love this, but I didn't find myself totally enthralled by its largely diaristic realism. As a truthful record of its times, it is good, but for that, we have the other, sometimes even better stories, and essays here full of pastoral detail and historical sense of place. Even Nerval's interests tend to endear me to him, as he seems to wander about Paris and its environs in a proto-derive or flaneur fashion, dwells upon the losses of urban development, and obsesses about Isis and the customs surrounding her in antiquity.

My concurrent reading of The Second Sex tends to color my readings of much else around it through it's sheer force and monolithic density (as it will for a while, give its near-endless 800 dense pages. In fact, de Beauvoir cites Nerval as belonging to the Bretonian tradition of gloryiging Women as the gateway natural wonder and inspiration, as one of the failed literary approaches to women, falling quite short of any authentic relationship. I'd say that Nerval actually fares a little better: his Aurelia may serve as guide to his dreamworld, but in an account of his own mounting madness, which rather turns the tables on Breton's exalting of Nadja, for instance. He's even acutely aware of the inherently problematic tendency to fall in love not with actual people but with his own images thereof. It's clear, even amidst his more rhapsodic passages, that this is his loss and he knowns it, not any failing of the women who move through his life and depart on to their own. So while Nerval may in some way illustrate the type of literary representation as de Beauvoir suggest, I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness by which he makes it rather more useful and interesting. ...more

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Sep 01, 2008 Chris rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: nobody

I strongly caution anyone who treasures the precious little time they have on this beautiful, big, blue planet not to squander it reading the work of Gerard Labrunie (inspired to use the name Nerval in homage to the estate of a wealthy ancestor). If, in the most unlikely of events, you happen to be captured by some twisted gang of malcontents and forced to read the work of Nerval under torture, do your family proud and deny this ridiculous request until they’re forced to kill you. This sounds li I strongly caution anyone who treasures the precious little time they have on this beautiful, big, blue planet not to squander it reading the work of Gerard Labrunie (inspired to use the name Nerval in homage to the estate of a wealthy ancestor). If, in the most unlikely of events, you happen to be captured by some twisted gang of malcontents and forced to read the work of Nerval under torture, do your family proud and deny this ridiculous request until they’re forced to kill you. This sounds like a drastic measure, but maybe one of these two scenarios will help you summon your inner strength:

1) Consider the wise words of Dumbledore at the end of ‘Goblet of Fire’ when he wisely states “Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to [Cedric Diggory:]”. That’s got to hit home with just about everybody.

2) Recall the inherent heroism from Dad’s Nam stories; not the ones about catching the clap while on R&R in Bangkok or tossing bricks of dope on a bonfire. I mean the stories in which he’d pull off his hefty radio equipment after a firefight only to realize the thing had absorbed a few bullets which would have crippled him if that cumbersome crap hadn’t been present; the damn thing actually managed to serve a purpose other than help him understand how much it absolutely sucks to drag about 50 additional pounds of equipment around in a fucking jungle while getting shot at! Sure, they couldn’t call in that critical airstrike to turn the tide of the battle (probably in NVA favor, seeing as it probably would have resulted in decimating his peeps due to friendly-fire when some myopic bombardier tried executing a strike with surgical precision on battling forces under a canopy of foliage) but they bravely fought on and eventually won they day. Nevermind the compelling sidenote that after botching the re-wiring of this primitive telecommunications device, his squad discovered they were somehow able to place calls to 976-JUGS, sending the platoon into a downward spiral of lethargy and preposterous beat-off sessions previously unknown to the annals of Asian history.

Think about those kinds of sacrifices; Cedric losing his life to unknowingly help galvanize the resolve of the wizarding community to purge the blight of Voldemort’s resurrection and our going toe-to-toe with Viet Nam, which I can only assume thwarted the menacing spread of communism that would have made “1984” a certifiable reality. Anyway, whatever the reason, I strongly recommend staying clear of Nerval, especially this edition of Aurelia & Other Writings.

It comes as no surprise to me that this edition was published by Exact Change. If I’ve learned one thing over the past couple of years, it’s that the cretins selecting works at Exact Change might possibly be the most dunderheaded morons currently working in concert. They claim to specialize in ‘bizarre’ and ‘decadent’ works which are vastly ‘under-appreciated’ and ‘esoteric’, mistakenly believing that the rest of the world is ignoring these writings for a reason other than that they suck and are usually preposterously asinine. It also seems like they select their authors more on the grounds of ridiculous shit they gained notoriety for, rather than any actual talent for telling a decent story, highlighted by their tendency to preface each weak edition with a cute little narrative on just how uncouth the author was instead of mentioning anything which might have something to do with the actual book or any justification for publishing it, other than to perpetuate the fallacy that because some well-heeled cretin acting like a goddam nimrod has something to say there might be something of worth buried amidst the ramblings. Come to think of it, I should probably be working at Exact Change myself, since I apparently can’t review a book without digressing into god knows what, kind of like this review…

Anyhow, let this serve as a notice to any aspiring authors out there struggling to get published, you’ve probably got a good shot at getting an offer from Exact Change if you’re willing to make a few minor compromises, including (but not limited to): 1) participating in sexual extravagances, anything from orgies, to incest, to incestuous orgies, 2) being committed to an asylum or tragically succumbing to some form of madness, 3) evidencing your deteriorating mental state by doing imbecilic shit like walking a lobster on a leash, unearthing corpses and toppling headstones, or diddling yourself in public, 4) killing yourself (this helps reduce the time spent uselessly quibbling with Exact Change regarding royalty checks, and besides, you’re certainly not doing it for the money, right? you’re all about artistic integrity). Such appear to be demanding criteria which Exact Change sets for the scribes of truly inspiring and timeless literature.

Gerard Nerval somehow managed to squeeze a little writing into his hectic schedule of naked poetry readings and eating ice cream from a skull while on leave from psychiatric care. It’s unfortunate that he had this idle time, as eventually someone was going to come along and mistake his eccentricity as a sure sign that Nerval had something profound to say. His magnum opus, ‘Aurelia’, begins this collection of catshit, and it didn’t take more than a few pages for me to realize that if this is accepted as the guy’s best work, I was probably going to end up throwing this filth in Lake Tahoe before my four-day vacation was over. In consideration for the other nekkid freaks at the clothing-optional beach where we decided to catch a few rays, I realized it would be a travesty to befoul the lake in this manner. On the other hand, struggling through Nerval’s inanity didn’t help to make my manhood look any more impressive on this exhibitionistic stretch of shoreline; if anything, it seemed to have to opposite effect, so I abandoned any attempt to finish the book for the time being and admired the scenery while contemplating how best to tan nude without getting a sunburn on my crusty, old ballsac.

About the only way I can sum up my feelings for ‘Aurelia’ is to classify it as the male counterpart to The Bell Jar, an agonizing look at abject stupidity and self-perpetuated helplessness which caused me to beg for the author to just…fucking…end…it…already; their story, their life, whichever they can summon up the grit to accomplish first. The story is pretty simple; a turgid tale of unrequited and senseless infatuation for a stage-actress (Aurelia) on behalf of a maladjusted loser (Nerval). Perhaps what I found most distressing was that I just couldn’t give a rat’s ass for the dilemma the narrator is entrenched in; I’d like to think that the allure of the whole ‘love-in-vain’ genre is that you need to come to sympathize to some degree with the embattled admirer, or to at least understand the basis for the undying love which they are professing. 'Aurelia' doesn’t inspire anything of the sort. Worse yet, Aurelia has the nerve to get ill and die almost immediately, and from that point on (page 4) the story crawls along with the narrator taking every opportunity to exclaim ‘woe is me’ while scribbling a bunch of horseshit about how he’d been done wrong by fate while succumbing to the dread malady of insanity. Every sentence drags on indefinitely, convoluted with meandering nothingness concerning his ‘eerie’ dream sequences and choc full of nonsensical solipsistic ballyhoo and pagan symbolism, believe it or not, it may even be worse than what you’re reading right now, if you can possibly fathom that.

The rest of the book isn’t much better. The second story, ‘Sylvie’ is (not surprisingly) almost the very same story as ‘Aurelia’. In this variant of the story, Nerval is a childhood friend/lover of Sylvie and manages to squander any chance of having a life with her through his own dumbass nature. A quote from ‘Aurelia’ actually sums up this story rather well: “It is too presumptuous to pretend that my state of mid was brought about only by a memory of love. Let us say rather that I dressed up with this idea the keenest remorse at a life spent in foolish dissipation, a life in which evil had often triumphed, and whose errors I did not recognize until I felt the blows of misfortune.”. I think Nerval’s own words show why he’s such a crappy lover, and hopefully illustrate why I couldn’t give a damn about his problems, which stem from his wanton indulgences only for him to retrospectively shed tears in self-pity.

The second half of the book manages to decrease in quality. This travesty begins with ‘Octavie’, in which Nerval graciously shows us examples of the ‘awesome’ and soul-stirring love letters he often brags about creating, which only brought to mind the typically pathetic “if-I-can’t-have-you-I-will-open-a-vein” rambling you expect to find scrawled in the journal of a recent high school suicide. In ‘Isis’, the reader is mesmerized by Nerval’s trip to Herculaneum; allowing his pagan and occult bullshit to flourish. A complete waste of paper follows with ‘The Chimeras’, a collection of poems, in both English and French, presumably just to prove they rhymed in the native tongue, which might be their only saving grace. In ‘Pandora’, our man Nerval once again makes an ass out of himself, and the book finally concludes with ‘Walks and Memories’, which I actually found to be the pick of the litter and the only story to make me crack a smile. Of course, it might not be coincidental that I also realized the book was drawing to a close at this point.
...more

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May 16, 2015 S̶e̶a̶n̶ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: somewhere-else, 2015, oneiric

Dream is a second life.

Gérard de Nerval sets out to break down the barrier between dreams and waking life. I’m on board with this. Aurélia is a lucid recitation and exposition of not only dreams, but various fugue states, metaphysical visions, hallucinatory episodes, and accounts of incarcerations in numerous asylums and clinics around the Paris metropolitan area. What is it about?! Everything! Alchemy! The creation of new life! Deconstruction and manipulation of religious iconography for covert purposes! Mythology made manifest! Obscure references to apocryphal texts! Transcendence from the corporeal world! The degree of autobiography contained within the text is irrelevant. Who cares. Suffice it to say that the man led a fascinating life, he really lived, and he wrote a fascinating book into which he likely poured a lot of raw material from that life. Here’s just a sample to whet the reading appetite:

From the moment I became certain that I was subject to sacred initiatory rights, an invincible force entered my spirit. I considered myself a living hero in the eyes of gods. Everything in nature took on new aspects, and secret voices emanated from plants, trees, animals, and the smallest insects, in order to warn me and encourage me. The language of my companions held a mysterious refrain which only I was able to comprehend, objects without shape or life lent themselves to my mental calculations; – from combinations of pebbles, from the shape of corners, crevices or openings, from the patterns of leaves, from colors, odors, and sounds, I saw emerge harmonies which had hitherto remained unknown – how, I asked myself, have I been able to exist estranged from nature for so long, without identifying with her? All things live, act, and relate to one another; magnetic rays emanating from myself or from others cross, without obstacle, the infinite chasm of all creation; these form a transparent network that covers the globe, and each separate thread communicates, one by one, to the stars and planets. Momentarily captive upon the earth, I take part in the universal chorus, which shares in all my joys and sorrows!

...more

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Aug 13, 2014 Castor Luwian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I thoroughly enjoyed most of this collection-- particularly Aurélia and Sylvie. Nerval is truly a Romantic; he expresses an often childlike sensitivity to life, a purity and naiveté of yearning, which is something I really appreciated: the absence of vanity in his writing; the ring of truth. He is always inebriated with wistful longing, and it's easy to get carried away with him.

There is a strong melancholic undercurrent to his observations on internal life, his romanticizations, and the externa ...more

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Jul 05, 2008 Patrick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Aurelia so enthralled me the first time I read it, I immediately went back to it and read it again. I had to make sure I had not imagined reading it. There are ideas about dreams and insanity in this book that I have been exploring and attempting to digest in my own writing for years. At once it seemed both familiar and strange. This is a major wellspring for some later surrealist writings, namely Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s Paris Peasant. Also, there is the translation of Sylvie in the Exact Ch ...more

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Aug 03, 2007 Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

As close as you can get to watching a person go insane, which means it's a wince-fest. Some amazing prose, like for instance the first paragraph. Last pages of this autobiographical novel were found in Nerval's pocket as he was dangling from the wooden beam he hanged himself from. Those surrealists... ...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Branden William rated it it was amazing

As a member of the eccentric Bouzingo group in France, in the 1830s, Gérard de Nerval was eventually praised by André Breton as a "prophet" of Surrealism for Nerval's pursuit of the significance of dreams, and for his "persistent vitality of an esoteric conception of the world." Nerval's 'Aurélia & Other Writings' is a beautiful collection of Nerval's most coveted short stories, including the novella 'Sylvie', which is often considered Nerval's prose masterpiece. These stories encapsulate a deep As a member of the eccentric Bouzingo group in France, in the 1830s, Gérard de Nerval was eventually praised by André Breton as a "prophet" of Surrealism for Nerval's pursuit of the significance of dreams, and for his "persistent vitality of an esoteric conception of the world." Nerval's 'Aurélia & Other Writings' is a beautiful collection of Nerval's most coveted short stories, including the novella 'Sylvie', which is often considered Nerval's prose masterpiece. These stories encapsulate a deep and passionate longing for idolized woman, esoteric deism, and autobiographical traveling. Breton placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes for a good reason. There is a particular reclusiveness that lies within Nerval's writing that identifies solely with a limited number of individuals. For this reason, Nerval will not be understood by everyone that attempts reading his dream-inspired writings. "Surrealism's official enthusiasm for Nerval seemed to take strongest hold with artists on the fringe of the group, those more alone rather than in the midst of Breton's collective campaigns." Nerval's insanity reached its conclusion when he hung himself from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba, from a window grating in 1855. Left are these documents; short story accounts of an author's unnerving downfall.

Fictionally autobiographical in nature, Aurélia is Nerval's account of his descent into madness, spending his life in and out of a mental asylum. Aurélia is a hallucinatory diary-like journey through the perils of obsession and madness, and the despairing realization of the truths surrounding mundane existence. This realization, Nerval explains, "is enough to drive a wise man mad; let us ensure that there is enough to make a madman sane." Nerval simply uses escapism to battle insanity. "Dreams are a second life," he begins. Aurélia, Nerval's obsession and muse, is the object of his fixation, however it is through dreams that Nerval finds peace and understanding. "I do not think the human imagination has invented anything which is not true either in this world or in others." Nerval's belief in immortality provides him with a newly founded strength, and his complete descent into madness concludes his curious investigation into the abyss, for "Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if not possible for the soul to unite them now?"

'Sylvie' on the other hand, is an esoteric break with conventionalism, depicting a hero's love for three different woman, all of whom he either loses or fails to attain affection for. This is an incredibly imaginative journey through the Middle Ages and traditions of the past, antiquarian in nature. Nerval shifts back and forth from past to present, proving the reader with a phantasmic perspective in conjunction with heart- break and misery. Melancholy is Nerval's driving force in Sylvie, inevitably obtaining none of the objects of his affection, though painting a beautiful backdrop to this dreamlike account of loves lost and memories attained.

'Isis,' 'Les Chimères,' and 'Pandora' is esoteric poetry at its best. They blend that perfect conjunction of the conscious and unconscious that the Surrealists praised as 'Le merveilleux'. Also popular among the Surrealists was their excessive streetwalking through the boulevards and cafés of Paris. In 'Walks & Memories' Nerval depicts this very scenario, among the slopes of Montmartre, the Château de Saint-Germain, and throughout his travels to Germany and the east. This is a personal favorite of mine--as a traveler and freighthopper myself-- illuminating the reader with antiquarian delights, interesting anyone with a subtle appreciation for the architecture and landscapes of 1850s Europe. These are dream travelogues; inventing a new literary genre of "dream-memoirs". "As I retrace these details I have to ask myself if they were real or I dreamed them."

Gerard de Nerval, precursor to Dada and Surrealism, is a poetic genius-- and aside from being forever known for walking a pet lobster on a leash-- opened illuminating gateways to the beyond; "representing the idea of a descent into hell." ...more

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Jul 30, 2007 Mitch rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The ultimate poet's poet, Nerval merges his dream world with the world we all share in these prose pieces, bringing about a kind of romantic apocalypse. Gorgeous and harrowing at the same time, the delicate pubescent longing of Sylvie becomes the cosmic eschatological last one standing narrative of Aurelia. Way out there. Not for everybody, though. Some might find his romanticism a bit much. Not me. It is just right. Blinding. ...more

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Nov 16, 2008 Darin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I wish everyone would read this book.

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Jun 21, 2009 Tess rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

Written as a novella but pure poetry.

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Oct 05, 2012 Joe Dwyer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: french-literature, favorites

"What is madness...to go on platonically loving a woman who will never love you."
—Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia (1855) ...more

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Jun 14, 2019 Jesse rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: french-lit, haunting-and-spectrality, nineteenth-century, read-in-2019, surrealism, time-and-temporality

The gorgeously bewildering Aurélia seems to provoke the most commentary, but it was the exquisite Sylvie that really knocked me out (as apparently it did Proust, who cited it as one of his major influences; later Joseph Cornell was similarly bewitched). Umberto Eco describes it as "the dream of a dream," and that's a better summation of what to expect with this collection than anything I could possibly hope to come up with myself. ...more

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Aug 10, 2008 Stephen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 19th-century, literature-in-translation

Having repeatedly come across Nerval in The Open Work and other writings by Umberto Eco—at a time when I was very much under the influence of the Italian—I was really pleased to find this handsome Damon & Naomi–published collection assigned in a seminar on fantastic literature in, I believe, 1997, and I offered to present on and write about it immediately. But it all seems like a dream now, and I can't remember much about the book, and I'm not sure what I would think of it now. I do remember tha ...more

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May 19, 2013 David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The author seems surprisingly modern.

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Oct 05, 2018 Alex marked it as to-read · review of another edition

An "almost pathological sense that reality is not stable," says my boy Warwick, and do I love that stuff? Yes I do. ...more

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Jul 24, 2008 Travis is currently reading it

The ravings of a madman? A cleverly constructed artifice? Both in different places? Nerval really did spend his adult life in and out of asylums, but he was also friends with lots of the biggest and best artists, writers, etc. in Paris in the 1840s and 50s.

Aurelia is about the "outpouring of the dream world into real life." Maddened by unrequited love for Aurelia, who at various points converges with the Virgin Mary, Cybele, Isis, etc. and is based on the real-life Marie Pleyel, Nerval passes i ...more

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Nov 27, 2007 Quinn Slobodian rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

Hadji tells me Nerval brought his own human skull to dinner parties to drink wine out of and that Proust loved him for his ability to narrate perfectly from the space between wakefulness and sleep. As far as I could tell, the protagonist of the main story broke up with his girlfriend, lost his mind, and traveled back to the genesis of time to re-live the history of the world, including witnessing rival Elohim battling on mountaintops, dinosaur-like beasts plodding across the landscape and passin ...more

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May 29, 2008 Tait rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french, literature

The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

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Apr 01, 2008 Erik added it · review of another edition

more people should read this. dream, memory, insanity, love

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Apr 30, 2009 J. Lynn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: french-and-fabulous, needed-more-context, epic, classics-that-aren-t-crap

I loved it even before I realized it was a 90 page struggle against castration.

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Apr 30, 2009 K. rated it it was amazing

Mystical and febrile novella, reminiscent of a William Blake print.
This, along with the writings of Unica Zurn, is true Surrealism.

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Mar 24, 2016 Amber rated it it was amazing

Shelves: french-lit, western-classics

A more French, more mystic Catcher in the Rye. I could (should, otherwise I'm a rude person) probably say more, but I'm sleepy. ...more

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May 19, 2017 Cen rated it it was ok · review of another edition

What's more tedious than random pomo ramblings? Occultist romantic outpourings ...more

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Oct 10, 2020 Bradley Clacy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: french, exact-change, madness-paranoia

Worth it for Aurélia, which describes the author's hallucinatory descent into madness and was influential to the surrealists and other writers like René Daumal and Antonin Artaud, but the other texts are not worth your time. ...more

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Feb 05, 2019 Phlegm rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4/5
Short and sweet with alot of fun descriptions of a dreamy world.
I would have liked a bit more plot though.

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Oct 11, 2010 AC rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Meyrink fans dying for a half-assed french version of "Golem"?

Recommended to AC by: Cocteau Twins

Shelves: french, 1850s

I was tricked into buying a collection of Nevral's writing by Cocteau Twins - supposedly they named songs on their amazing album "Treasure" after some of Nevral's characters. I've only got through half of Aurelia and I don't know if I ever get down to read some other things.

"Aurelia" is mysticism and romanticism, understood as wrongly as possible - incoherent ramblings about myths from various cultures mixed together without a shadow of a doubt, half-witted ideas about paradise and immortality p ...more

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About Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval

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Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.

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“l'imagination m'apportait des délices infinies. En recouvrant ce que les hommes appellent la raison, faudra-t-il regretter de les avoir perdues...?

My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of these joys?...” — 16 likes

“You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight, at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms, you think you remember having lived in other forms, you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars, the horizon of Saturn and Jupiter spreads before your eyes, bizarre creatures appear before you with all the characteristics of real beings . . . If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are, to say the very least!” — 11 likes

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