Recommendations
Books Like L'Or by Blaise Cendrars
Novels where the facts carry all the feeling
Cendrars's spare documentary prose about Sutter gives no emotional commentary — the reader supplies all the feeling the text withholds, and the effect is devastating. These novels share that same refusal to tell you how to feel: the facts do the work.
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Buy on AmazonMoravagine
by Blaise Cendrars
Cendrars's surrealist novel — an escaped asylum patient who destroys everything; the violent and extraordinary counterpart to L'Or's documentary restraint; essential for the full Cendrars
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Buy on AmazonRhum
by Blaise Cendrars
The companion documentary novel — the Caribbean pirate Jean Galmot; the same spare factual prose as L'Or applied to a different adventurer story; read after the masterpiece
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Buy on AmazonLa Main coupée
by Blaise Cendrars
The WWI autobiography — Cendrars losing his arm in the Foreign Legion; the documentary method applied to the author's own experience; his greatest prose
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Buy on AmazonLa Condition humaine
by André Malraux
Malraux's Shanghai novel — the shared interwar adventurer-writer tradition in which Cendrars and Malraux are both central figures; the political adventure where Cendrars writes personal adventure
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Buy on AmazonIn Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
The American documentary novel — Capote's investigation of the Clutter murders; the transatlantic parallel to Cendrars's documentary method, though forty years later and with a very different cultural context
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Buy on AmazonL'Or
by Jack London
London's Gold Rush fiction — the shared California gold rush subject matter; reading London alongside Cendrars shows how different the American and French literary approaches to the same historical material can be
- 7Buy on Amazon
La Prose du Transsibérien
by Blaise Cendrars
The avant-garde long poem — the founding text of Cendrars's career; the Trans-Siberian railway in a simultaneous book with Sonia Delaunay; the poetic Cendrars before the documentary novels
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Buy on AmazonVol de nuit
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Night Flight — the shared aviator-adventurer-writer tradition; Saint-Exupéry and Cendrars are the two great French writers for whom physical risk is the basis of literary authority
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