Anicet or the Panorama: A Dadaist Novel (Atlas Anti-Classics: Dadaist)

Amazon first requires the reviewer to categorise the book as "predictable", "some twists" or "full of surprises". Of course, I chose "predictable", as anyone familiar with this author, as I am not, would naturally yawn at the content of twists and surprises. If you feel a need to understand integrity, and will accept that neither decency norcoherence are its synonyms, then read the book. If not, then you are mistaken, and you should read the book.As this is the only reader's review here to date I feel obliged to say something about the book's content. The book itself is a fascinating whirlwind, and that is enough description of it. The book's context is the psychological world created by the Great War, silent movies, and the moralities of the artists, entrepreneurs and thinkers of that time. The book mixes monologues, filmic episodes and other devices with no apparent planned sequence. Not only is this great fun, it is scarily realistic (if the author can see this I imagine he is upset by it, but content to be so).Does this book matter today ? Like records of a past medical examinations, it is. While the author has strived to avoid leaving any meaning at the time of writing, as a historical artefact the book generates a question. Should we ever allow such conditions to come to pass again ? Then, thinking of answers (ways to avoid a society where such a book becomes necessary, while allowing freedom of speech), the question changes. How can we justify moral reasoning ? This question then falls apart through semantics (morality is justification etc), and a new question arises. If meaning died in the 1920s, what does my review mean anyway ? At which point I give up. Louis Aragon wins.Stepping back out of the world so clearly understood in Anicet, I must confess that I first picked up this novel only because of my friendship with the translator, Antony Melville. It only took the first page to hook me and reel me in. Anicet has been educational for me. I knew nothing of Dadaism before reading Anicet. Afterwards I feel I know so much less about anything else that I must have acquired some understanding of the Dadas, or at least their spirit. If you like the book, then all is well. If you dislike the book's absurdities then try to contrast the world as seen in Anicet with the world you see on the news, in the cinema, in politicians' chambers, in your workplace. You may at least come, as I have, to feel some bond of confused commonality with Louis Aragon, and gratitude to the splendid translation and production by Mr Melville and his colleagues at Atlas Press.