The Poet Assassinated and other stories by Guillaume Apollinaire (1984)

I was ready to be thoroughly irritated by this, but was somehow charmed. The main piece, occupying half the book, is clanking surrealism, and has all the concomitant irritants - meaninglessness, half-bakedness, terrible lack of direction and fullness, but also conversely a few inspiring mind-spurts, and cheeky playfulness. The remaining fifteen pieces are characterised much more by eccentric whimsy, and are only sporadically surreal. Some, like The Moon King (a Ludwig of Bavaria dream) and Saint Adorata (a faux-archaeological Passion) are fascinating slow bursts of soft colour in the memory. Some are a little nastier or duller. The surprise was the last story, The Case of the Masked Corporal. The title has a sub-clause: That is, The Poet Resuscitated. It acts as a summary coda. One sees it initially as standard, replete as it is with bits of concrete prose. Then it opens out into the story of the poet in the Great War, avatar of Apollinaire himself, experiencing a return of many of the characters from the stories in the book, themselves resuscitated and carrying on where they left off. It ends with the sense of the end coming; will the poet be killed in the War, or was Apollinaire aware of his own coming demise? Here he touches the frizzled edges of emotion, albeit in code.