A Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud

Rating: ★★★★
21/05/14

I'm an organized person. Psychotically organized. Except when it comes to books. I try to plan my readings, I try to finish one book in order to begin a new one, but it's all in vain. I read what I want to read, whenever I have the need of reading it. So, with four books on my currently-reading shelf, today I felt like reading something different. First, some weird stuff by Tim Burton, then, A Season in Hell caught my attention and here we are.

Anyway, this is one of those books I should read while being drunk. Unfortunately, I don't drink. So, it was kind of difficult to understand what the hell I was reading. This prose work, written by Rimbaud at age 18, is divided in nine parts. And that's the most accurate observation I can give. The rest is pure symbolism hard to get if you haven't read something about his life and his troubled affair with Verlaine (quite a profound inspiration here). These are words written by a young and tormented soul, desperate to put everything out there, to purge himself. Words written with exquisite sensibility, describing beautiful, dark, intense images. I saw that, in all its glory, in the first part, Introduction.

The second part, Bad Blood, it's a collection of the consequences of his ancestors, his blood, and other weird reflections that made me think I probably wouldn't like what he was smoking at that time.

The third part was... well, I don't want to say that I enjoyed reading it, because it's about the narrator's death and his arrival to hell (nothing really nice to read right before going to bed, honestly), but it's beautifully written. Again, this young man makes you feel what was going through his mind and soul with unsettling details.

The forth part is Ravings I, Foolish Virgin, The Infernal Spouse. I'm guessing you can imagine to whom he's referring in this one.

I shouldn't keep spoiling this, right?. So, during all this strange journey from existence on earth to condemnation in hell, it remains only one question to be asked: can he be saved? Even though he's already in hell, can he find any sort of mitigation, salvation even?

Yeah... I'm not answering that. I had a good, weird, dark, sad, freaky, confusing, unsettling, challenging, disturbing read. Your turn.