Days And Nights (Alfred Jarry) (Atlas Press 1989)
ISBN  0-947757-19-8 

ALFRED JARRY is chiefly known as the creator of UBU, the anti-hero of what is acknowledged as the first "absurd" drama, but this was only one facet of a writer now seen as one of the most vital (and peculiar) influences on the French literature of this century.

Jarry wrote his great visionary novel Days & Nights when he was only 24, and it has much in common with the works of two other youthful geniuses: Rimbaud and Lautreamont. Days & Nights is Jarry's masterpiece: its hero, an army conscript, uses various means to escape his intolerable everyday life. Eventually he is consumed by dreams, hallucinations, drug orgies. He abandons reality altogether and pursues a strange erotic quest: "The Double."

Jarry's language is dense, humorous and has a richness and idiosyncrasy that makes it less than surprising that this is the first translation of his most important novel.

Days & Nights also has an historical importance. Although written in 1897, it was years ahead of its time. It was the culmination of French Symbolism, yet foresaw many of the concerns of the "modern novel" and profoundly influenced both Joyce and the Surrealists.

“Published in 1897, Days and Nights is a curious hybrid… incorporating elements of roman à clef, based around Jarry’s own circle of young Symbolist hangers-on, transcripts of free-associating drug sessions, gobbets of literary parody, and metamorphical conceits that show the distinct influence of Lautréamont… Jarry’s singularity lay less in individual texts than in his refusal of fixity – making him in his writing one of pre-modernism’s great disguise artists, and in his life too perhaps the founding father of performance art.” [Jonathan Romney, Time Out] 

“Atlas Press would like to thank Alexis Lykiard for his excellent rendering of a novel so spectacularly difficult to translate” [Alastair Brotchie]