• For Your Consideration:
• A First US Edition in HARDCOVER from 1912 in VG condition:
• “CARMEN SYLVA AND SKETCHES FROM THE ORIENT”
(MacMillan, 1912) (Hardcover, First US Edition, First Printing)
• BY PIERRE LOTI
• TRANSLATED BY FRED ROTHWELL
• “During my wanderings, I once chanced to spend a few days with a fairy, in an enchanted castle. The distant sound of a horn in the forest depths invariably brings back to my mind the most trivial incidents of this visit.”
• “PIERRE LOTI remains, in the mechanism of style and cadence, one of the most original and most perfect French writers of the second half of the 19th century…. Many of his best books are long sobs of remorseful memory, so personal, so intimate, that an English reader is amazed to find such depth of feeling compatible with the power of minutely and publicly recording what is felt.”
—EDMUND GOSSE
• “PROUST was an avid reader of the French novelist PIERRE LOTI when he was young. Contemporary accounts show that he was able to recite whole passages from LOTI’s work in public from memory.”
• For other details about this book, please see below.
TITLE: “CARMEN SYLVA”
AUTHOR: PIERRE LOTI
TRANSLATOR: FRED ROTHWELL
TYPE: HARDCOVER
PUBLISHER, LOCALE, & YEAR: MacMILLAN CO. (New York), 1912
EDITION: First US Edition, First Printing*
*RE: The publication date of 1912 on the Title Page corresponds to the publication date of 1912 on the Copyright Page—with no later printings listed.
NOTE: This copy is NOT an ex-library copy.
PAGES: 214+
ISBN: N/A (Pre-ISBN)
CONDITION OF BOOK: VERY GOOD.
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
• “LOTI is a man for our time: in an age when globalisation and imperialism have found more insidious forms of control than those known to the French and British Empires, he reminds us that even inside the armed services of the imperial power, dissenters can speak out.”
• “What makes LOTI so extraordinary…is not that he was an escapist, but that he was an escapologist, getting out of scrapes and away with behaviour that would normally lead to disaster, disgrace, even death.”
—KATHRYN GAUCI (BLOG)
• “PIERRE LOTI was a 19th-century French writer who was admired by writers as various as HENRY JAMES, JOSEPH CONRAD, WILLA CATHER, and MARCEL PROUST, but is now almost totally forgotten. When LOTI was alive, HENRY JAMES considered his novels to be those of ‘a man of genius…one of the joys of the time…the companion of my own selection.’ WILLA CATHER said she ‘would swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of LOTI in her work,’ JOSEPH CONRAD used one of LOTI’s books for HEART OF DARKNESS, and MARCEL PROUST used another for SWANN’S WAY.”
• “Tell me, why do you so scorn LOTI? If anyone told me they saw a trace of LOTI in anything I had done, I’d swoon with joy. And here you are indignant at such a suggestion. I don’t know the new one you read but LE PÊCHEUR D’ISLAND[E], LE DÉSERT, LE ROMAN D’UN SPAHI, and a dozen more are surely among the most beautiful things in the world. They stir one up like music and steal your senses away in the same fashion.”
• “A novelist, naval officer, scuba diver, world traveler, journal writer, art collector, amateur bodybuilder and acrobat, LOTI created an international in the early part of the 20th century. Born LOUIS-MARIE-JULIEN VIAUD, he was first called ‘LOTI’ in Tahiti, after an island flower; the actress SARAH BERNHARDT gave him the name ‘PIERRE.’ Although he has faded into obscurity, his peculiar world is still on display in the three-story house where he was born and lived on and off for most of his life, in the town of Rochefort, 250 miles southwest of Paris.”
—ELAINE SCIOLINO, NEW YORK TIMES
• “A new French talent…. A man of action who happens to have a genius for literary expression…. His talent never falters…. He plays from his own bat, imitating no one…. The remarkable genius who has assumed in literature the name of PIERRE LOTI…. As an officer in the French navy, perpetually circumnavigating the globe, M. LOTI has spent most of his life…in strange waters and far lands…. To be such a rover of the deep, such a dabbler in adventure as would delight the soul of MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, and yet to have at one’s command a sensitive and expressive apparatus…is to have little need of ‘cultivating’ originality, as M. GUY DE MAUPASSANT the other day recommended us to do…. The English reader ought already to have been notified (the plainest good faith requires it and I have delayed much too long), that a good deal of what he has to tell us relates mainly to his successes among the ladies. We have a great and I think a just dislike to literary confidences on such points…and there is simply nothing to reply to any English reader who on ascertaining this circumstance may declare that he desires to hold no commerce with him; nothing, that is, but simply to remark that such a reader will lose a rare pleasure.”
• “[LOTI’s works] are savoured to the point of intoxication, of delirium, of stupor, even, the bitter flavour of exotic love.”
—ANATOLE FRANCE, WINNER, 1921, NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
• “A musician himself, LOTI had an ear for music, much like CATHER. He was very sensitive to the sounds of Arab tambourines, or of Asian and African instruments and their different scales. But his fine ear is also attuned to the complexities of silence in the wilderness he passes through…. To give a sense of the otherworldly South, his prose uses rhythm in a masterly way, much like CATHER’s.”
• “A record of impressions through the dim years of awakening…. All that LOTI is and has been is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child…. And the style?—dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with its exquisite music…. It is fortunate that the translator has caught the subtle charm of LOTI’s style, so difficult to render in another speech, in an amazing degree. This is peculiarly necessary here, for accuracy of translation means giving the delicate changes of color and elusive chords of music that voice the moods and impressions of which the book is made…. Let us read the revelation of this book not primarily to condemn or praise, or even to estimate and define, but to appreciate. If it be true that no one ever looked into the Kingdom of Heaven except through the eyes of a little child, if it be true that the eyes of every unspoiled child are such a window, take the vision and be thankful.”
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