Raymond Roussel ~5 hr read

A wealthy inventor guides visitors around his estate, unveiling one baffling marvel after another, resurrected corpses, a diamond-filled aquarium, machines of impossible ingenuity.

Raymond Roussel's 1914 'Locus Solus' is a hallucinatory avant-garde masterpiece of pure invention, hugely influential on the Surrealists. Strange, dazzling, unique. Read it for a landmark of the fantastic imagination, a procession of wonders unlike anything else in literature, in French.

In its time

Published in 1914, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

~5 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).