Disaster Was My God

April 11, 2011
Having already fictionalized the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein (The World as I Found It), Duffy now sets his sights on Arthur Rimbaud, who, as a teenager, caused a scandal in Paris with his decadent poetry and his affair with the older, married poet Paul Verlaine. But in 1873, at age 20, Rimbaud is through with Verlaine, poetry, and Paris, and announces his farewell in "A Season in Hell" before settling in Africa, where he becomes an arms merchant. A sickness forces him to return to France for treatment and a final confrontation with the overbearing mother he'd fled from 20 years earlier. Duffy recreates Rimbaud's absinthe-drenched life in Paris and imaginatively fills in the gaps of his later career in Africa, where the poet finds, to his chagrin, that his literary reputation in France has been enhanced by his absence. Duffy's Rimbaud is like a character created by Conrad after a long night spent in the company of the Green Fairy, but the conceit isn't helped by the author too often straining the reader's patience with sentences that try to out-Rimbaud Rimbaud, resulting in a strange but not unappealing mashup of Moulin Rouge and Heart of Darkness.