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Translated from the French by Nina Rootes
Confessions of Dan Yack continues the adventures of the
eccentric English millionaire Dan Yack. Yack is Blaise Cendrar’s
alter ego and the Confessions represent the distilled
riches of the author’s picaresque life, purportedly spoken
into a Dictaphone and divided into nine ‘cylinders’
which constitute the book’s chapters.
He tells the story of his tender love for the young Mireille
(daughter of one of many mistresses) whom he meets in a crowded
tabac in a Paris gone mad on Armistice night, 1918.
This love transforms Dan Yack’s life: he abandons his
women, gives up his fast cars and debauchery to marry this
convent-educated girl of his dreams. To indulge Mireille’s
fantasies he launches her as a film star by creating films
for her and casting her in wraith-like roles inspired by Edgar
Allan Poe. But before long Mireille is struck by a mysterious
and fatal illness, the psychological origins of which raise
disturbing questions about the nature of their relationship.
Whereas Dan Yack’s previous memoir celebrated Yack’s
exploits with malicious bravado, the Confessions of Dan
Yack is a bittersweet memoir of love and loss in which
the typically earthy, reckless Cendrars surface is shot through
with profound melancholy and a palpable sense of psycho-sexual
disburbance.
‘Poet, lover war hero and adventurer, Cendrars led
a life as glamorous as Hemingway tried to make his seem,
and this novel reads like the original black-and-white original
of which A Moveable Feast was the glossy remake.’
– Michael Dibden, Independent on Sunday
‘A beautifully written work, memorable and compelling
and superbly translated. It makes one reach out for everything
else he ever wrote.’ – Sunday Telegraph
‘Cendrars’s combination of pace, insight, invention
and dark humour make Confessions an even more astonishing
book than its predecessor. Today’s great names seldom
say half as much in twice the space. Apart from taking
a breakneck alpine drive under the stars in an open Hispano
with Joyce, Freud and Garbo arguing on the back seat and
Hemingway boxing with a kangaroo in the dickey, there
is nothing quite like reading Cendrars.’ – Independent
BLAISE
CENDRARS was born Fréderic Sauser in
1887 of mixed Swiss and Scottish descent. A legendary adventurer,
his life in Moscow, Peking, New York and Paris inspired his
brilliant, action-packed narratives. The author of more than
twenty books, his works have been translated into eleven languages
(including Braille). A founder of the modern movement in literature,
he inspired poets from John Dos Passos to Patti Smith. He
died in Paris in 1961. |
