Mingling fact and fiction, The Three Rimbauds imagines how Rimbaudmsquo;s life would have unfolded had he not died at the age of thirty-seven.
The myth of Arthur Rimbaud (1854 dash;1891) focuses on his early years: how the great enfant terrible tore through the nineteenth-century literary scene with reckless abandon, leaving behind him a trail of enemies, the failed marriage of an ex-lover who shot him, and a body of revolutionary poetry that changed French literature forever. He stopped writing poetry at the age of twenty-one when he left Europe to travel the world. He returned only shortly before his death at the age of thirty-seven.
But what if 1891 marked not the year of his death, but the start of a great new beginning: the poetisquo;s secret return to Paris, which launched the mature phase of his literary career? This slim, experimental volume by Dominique Noguez shows that the imaginary rdquo;maturexdquo; Rimbaud/dash;the one who returned from Harar in 1891, married Paul Claudel squo;s sister in 1907, converted to Catholicism in 1925, and went on to produce some of the greatest works in twentieth-century French proseodash;was already present in the almost forgotten works of his childhood, in style and themes alike. Only by reacquainting ourselves with the three Rimbaudsrdash;child, young adult, and imaginary older adultudash;can we truly gauge the range of the complete writer.
