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A review by ac_church
Aurelia & Other Writings by Gérard de Nerval
1.0
I was tricked into buying a collection of Nevral's writing by Cocteau Twins - supposedly they named songs on their amazing album "Treasure" after some of Nevral's characters. I've only got through half of Aurelia and I don't know if I ever get down to read some other things.
"Aurelia" is mysticism and romanticism, understood as wrongly as possible - incoherent ramblings about myths from various cultures mixed together without a shadow of a doubt, half-witted ideas about paradise and immortality paraded like revelations, a character who loves a dead woman so tragicly, that the best he could to describe her or his feelings for her is to write "she" with a capital letter and in italics. Wow.
And about those dream sequences. Dear Gerard. You don't just write something like "and then I saw a thousand faces in a thousand rivers" or "some strange ugly beast rushed past me" to create a mystical, or dream-like, or spooky emotion. Nor do you constantly tell, that everything described in the story is utterly insane. Unfortunately it takes a little bit more of imagination to create books that are akin to dreams.
"Aurelia" is mysticism and romanticism, understood as wrongly as possible - incoherent ramblings about myths from various cultures mixed together without a shadow of a doubt, half-witted ideas about paradise and immortality paraded like revelations, a character who loves a dead woman so tragicly, that the best he could to describe her or his feelings for her is to write "she" with a capital letter and in italics. Wow.
And about those dream sequences. Dear Gerard. You don't just write something like "and then I saw a thousand faces in a thousand rivers" or "some strange ugly beast rushed past me" to create a mystical, or dream-like, or spooky emotion. Nor do you constantly tell, that everything described in the story is utterly insane. Unfortunately it takes a little bit more of imagination to create books that are akin to dreams.