The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy

By Gérard de Nerval

First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France's short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true history of a certain seventeenth-century swashbuckler, Nerval sought to deride the press censors of the day who forbade the serial publication of novels in newspapers - and in the process he provocatively deconstructed existing distinctions between fact and fiction. Never before translated into English and still unavailable as a separately published volume in French, The Salt Smugglers is a pre-postmodern gem of experimental prose. Richard Sieburth's vibrant translation and illuminating afterword remind us why G rard de Nerval's blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0980033063
• ISBN13: 9780980033069
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Length: 147 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.9" x 6.6"