Description

FIRST EDITION.
ONE OF 13 COPIES ON JAPON IMPÉRIALFirst paper before 23 copies on Hollande laid paper, 486 on vellum pur-fil, and 50 copies hors-commerce on esparto.

A wacky tale inspired by the marvellous, the orientalist and the macabre, Farfelu Kingdom recounts the capture of Ipsahan, the former capital of the Persian Empire.

Emperor Basil II [...] whom we historians call the Bulgarocton, had the countless Bulgarian fighters he had taken prisoner blinded. He arranged them in lines of ten, holding hands, and gave them an eleventh prisoner as a guide, from whom he had only one eye plucked out. The army that had vowed to take Byzantium thus returned to Bulgaria in the cold, through wild mountains and barren countryside. For centuries, its route was recognised by the endless line of tombs of blind soldiers, tall stones topped, like targets, by open eyes. Prince Vlad of Transylvania, during his great retreat, had the corpses of the Turks perched in the trees. Many years later, when the Sultan's troops were able to advance again along the path of the invasions, they had to walk between endless rows of trees lined with skeletons in which vultures and storks had made their nests, with dead branches bigger than rib bones (pp. 54-55).

The young Malraux began working at Farfelu Kingdom as early as 1920, when he was making the final corrections to Paper moons. A first version of the tale appeared in 1925 in theIndochina under the title "The Ipsahan expedition"A second, considerably reworked and augmented with baroque elements (Drieu la Rochelle writes that these "prose poems" "smell of literary opium"is published in Commerce in July 1927 under the new title of "Travel to the Fortunate Islands". Malraux then suggested it to Gaston Gallimard. "Travel to the Fortunate Islands"lands on Jean Paulhan's desk, who comments "Yes, if other books by him". A contract was signed accordingly: Farfelu Kingdom, was published by NRF, and Gallimard obtained an option on five of the author's novels. The gamble paid off, as Malraux entrusted the publisher with The Human Condition.

To describe his early works, inspired by the cubist poetry of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Reverdy, Malraux borrowed from the Rabelaisian vocabulary the term "cubism".wacky"which he links to the Italian "farfalla"(butterfly). According to Curtis Cate, "the word "farfelu" was therefore associated in his mind with everything that is light, capricious, whimsical, inherent to the realm of poetry and dreams, and opposed to the prosaic world of everyday logic". (p. 168) Between 1920 and 1928, he wrote three of these "far-fetched" stories: Lunes de Papier, Farfelu Kingdom and Written for an idol with a trunk (fragments). Long regarded as the experiments of a young writer, the farfelus are now the subject of studies that tend to demonstrate their continuity with the author's novelistic output. The farcical, already inhabited by the essential themes of Malrus' work, continues to haunt the scenes of fever and dreams, and reappears through grotesque characters such as Clappique.

A fine copy