The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle

A Rimbaudesque novella of wayward wanderlust and liberty from the cofounder of Surrealism

Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917 and written a few months later after his fateful encounter with Lautr¿ont¿s Maldoror, Philippe Soupault¿s novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle preceded the author¿s involvement with Parisian Dada and the Surrealist movement he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a schoolmate¿s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance, Soupault imagines his alter ego¿s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.
After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897¿1990) cofounded the Surrealist movement with Andr¿reton and Louis Aragon, and authored with