This, the last of those books ordered through Abebooks.com, and I have to say, the more I read Cendrars the more I like him. His writing style, rhythm, descriptions, all curiously in sympathy with mine own. A shame he's so hard to find (I'll be ordering a few more - fortunately he wrote a great deal).
Notes so far: his references to Gerard de Nerval (whom I can't seem to find in translation, although Umberto Eco referred to him in such glowing terms I'll have to keep up the search); his mentioning of 'thrashing' Rainer Maria Rilke, mentions of Restif de la Bretonne, (another novelist I'll have to track down, also abundantly mentioned by Bloch in his book on de Sade). And a few more authors - always it seems the more I read, the more ignorant I become, but time with Cendrars is time well spent...
"Well then, the gap continued to open in front of us, I led Léger through the market, then took a zigzagging path between the shacks, the yards, the chicken-coops, the tiny gardens, the waste lots of the zone-dwellers enclosed by bare walls topped with broken glass, fenced in by barbed-wire, stakes, old railway sleepers, and full of ferocious dogs, their collars bristling with nails, chained up but running the length of a strong piece of wire, or several meters of taut cable, which allowed them to hurl themselves like demons from one end to the other of their bare pens, bounding, barking, slavering with rage amongst the empty, battered petrol cans tumbled everywhere, the burst barrels, the ripped sheets of tin, the mattress springs that sprouted from the soil of the dung-heap, the broken crocks and pots, bashed-in tin cans, mounds of discarded kitchen utensils, broken-up vehicles, piles of disgorged filth, surrounded by thistles and measly clumps of lilac or dominated, Golgotha-like, by the skeleton of a tree, a stunted elder or a tortured acacia, a runt of a lime, with its amputated stumps poking through the handle of a chamber-pot, or its lopped-off upper branches crowned with an ancient motor-tyre; I crossed rue Blanqui and, on the other side, fortifications, at whose foot the 'Academy of the Little Charlie Chaplins' was installed; it consisted of five or six oblong sheds that served as a dormitory for the children and as dens for the bears that were being trained haphazardly in this sinister institution, which was, to boot, an all-night bistro and a thieves' kitchen for cut-throats and prowlers."
That a single sentence to open the chapter.
Or this, a sumptuous description of a meal:
"...my Don Quixote invited me to share with him the 'plat de Lucullus' in a pleasure-garden in Saint-Ouen, which he had just discovered, and this famous dish, invented and cooked by Lerouge, was nothing less than a salad-bowl filled of blackbirds' tongues cooked in white butter and perfumed with rose and violet, which we ate with croutons dipped in celery-liquor, and washed down with long draughts of Alicante, while the patron of that 'chigana', a Spanish gipsy, pattered round the dish in his espadrilles, excusing himself in a tone of complaint:
'They're only blackbirds' tongues, it's not the season for nightingales . . . .'
There were more than two thousand tongues; it must have cost good old LeRouge a fortune, and he was not exactly rolling in money."
Time to slow down on the reading and get some more books ordered...