The Great Easter: Ambulation
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- Synopsis
- A hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur wanders the streets of Paris over the long Easter weekend of 1960.Paris, Easter weekend 1960. The French composer Jacques Besse sets out on a marathon stroll through the city that begins on Good Friday, when he leaves his brother&’s house on rue de Turbigo, and ends on Easter Monday, when, having declared himself Mars, the god of war, to mystified restaurant-goers, he ambles back toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Great Easter—a memoir in the form of a novella, or perhaps a novella in the form of a memoir—is the first-person account of a hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur&’s unending ambulation. The Great Easter was first published in French in 1969 and became famous a few years later when in their milestone work Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to Besse&’s walk as the quintessential &“double stroll of the schizo.&” (Besse was a patient at Guattari&’s psychiatric clinic La Borde.) Besse&’s stroll purées past and present, real and not-real: a rendezvous with a prostitute intersects with Sergei Eisenstein and his entourage, a bellowed song about the sea is overwhelmed by &“memories&” of the 1830 July Revolution, and the entire universe gathers itself up into a bubble above Gare d&’Austerlitz. He is seized by anxiety, released by joy; he announces his cosmic celebrity via a huge (imaginary) television while freezing in the night and calling out for bread. A cult favorite in France, The Great Easter is an engrossing, surreal road movie of a book.
- Copyright:
- 2022
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780262370578
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780262047081
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Date of Addition:
- 09/13/22
- Copyrighted By:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
- Translator:
- Keith Harris
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- by Jacques Besse
- in Nonfiction
- in Literature and Fiction
- in Language Arts
- in Philosophy