Maldoror (In contemporary American English)

While ordinary people live in the midst of reveries, daydreams, common dreams, and nightmares, Maldoror lives in a continuous psychotic hallucination in which he encounters angels, gravediggers, hermaphrodites, lunatics, prostitutes, and innocent and not so innocent children, whom he victimizes—prey of his self-proclaimed pederasty. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous, yet seductive and grandiose in language and imagery, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Verlaine, Gide, Breton, Octavio Paz—and Salvador Dali in painting. Readers seeking a conventional narrative will be surprised, for the author spares no effort to dislocate linear time, disguising voices and appearances, to penetrate the depths of animate and inanimate sojourners on their way to death.