Reading Order
L'OrL'Or Reading Order
L'Or (Sutter's Gold, 1925) by Blaise Cendrars is the founding text of the French documentary novel — the story of Johann Sutter, the Swiss immigrant who built an empire in California and was ruined by the Gold Rush of 1848, told in a deliberately spare, factual prose that reads like a documentary chronicle. Cendrars was the most genuinely cosmopolitan of the French avant-garde writers: he had traveled to China as a young man, lost his right arm in the First World War, worked in Hollywood, spent years in Brazil, and had an intimate connection to the Cubist and Dada worlds (he collaborated with Fernand Léger on La Prose du Transsibérien, 1913, the first 'simultaneous book'). L'Or was an immediate bestseller and established Cendrars as one of the major French writers of the interwar period; it was followed by Rhum (1930), a similar documentary account of the Caribbean pirate and adventurer Jean Galmot, and Moravagine (1926), a surrealist novel of extraordinary violence. Cendrars's autobiography — the four-volume L'Homme foudroyé (1945), La Main coupée (1946), Bourlinguer (1948), and Le Lotissement du ciel (1949) — is the masterpiece of his late career.
Where to start
Read L'Or first — it is short, direct, and completely gripping; the spare documentary prose requires no special preparation. Then read La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913) for the early avant-garde Cendrars — the long poem-collage of the Trans-Siberian railway; and La Main coupée (1946) for the extraordinary WWI autobiography.
Complete L'Or Book List
- 1Buy
L'Or
Blaise Cendrars·1925·Start here — Sutter's Gold; short and completely gripping; the documentary prose; the California empire destroyed by the Gold Rush; the founding text - 2Buy
La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France
Blaise Cendrars·1913·The avant-garde long poem — the Trans-Siberian railway and Joan of Arc; the simultaneous book with Sonia Delaunay; the essential early Cendrars - 3Buy
Moravagine
Blaise Cendrars·1926·The surrealist novel — an escaped patient from a Swiss asylum who destroys everything he touches; violent and extraordinary; Cendrars at his most formally experimental - 4Buy
La Main coupée
Blaise Cendrars·1946·The Severed Hand — the WWI autobiography; the time in the Foreign Legion before losing his arm; Cendrars's most direct self-revelation and his greatest prose - 5Buy
Rhum
Blaise Cendrars·1930·Rum — the documentary account of the Caribbean pirate Jean Galmot; the companion to L'Or in the documentary novel mode; read after the masterpiece
L'Or — Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Johann Sutter?
Johann August Sutter (1803–1880) was a Swiss immigrant who emigrated to California in 1839 and built, in the Sacramento Valley, what was essentially a private kingdom — New Helvetia — with his own fort (Sutter's Fort, now Sacramento), his own militia, and 50,000 acres of productive land. In January 1848, gold was discovered at his sawmill on the American River (the event that started the California Gold Rush), and the Gold Rush destroyed everything Sutter had built: his workers abandoned him for the gold fields, his land was overrun by squatters, his cattle were slaughtered, his crops went unharvested. He spent the rest of his life in unsuccessful litigation and died in poverty in Washington DC, lobbying Congress for compensation that never came. Cendrars found in Sutter's story the perfect documentary novel: the man who owned California before California had value, and who was destroyed by the very discovery that made California worth owning.
What is the documentary novel in Cendrars's hands?
Cendrars's documentary prose style in L'Or is the opposite of the conventional historical novel: instead of imagining the interior life of historical figures (as Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas would), Cendrars stays on the surface — facts, actions, movements, quantities. The prose has the quality of a newspaper report or a shipping ledger: Sutter built this, Sutter owned that, Sutter lost this. The emotional effect comes entirely from the accumulation of facts and their implications — the reader supplies the feeling that the prose withholds. This style was enormously influential on later French documentary writing and on the new journalism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
What is La Prose du Transsibérien?
La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913) is one of the founding texts of avant-garde poetry — a long poem of the Trans-Siberian railway journey printed in a two-meter accordion-fold format with simultaneous illustrations by Sonia Delaunay, the first 'simultaneous book.' The poem is Cendrars's account of a real or imagined Trans-Siberian journey, punctuated by the questions of his companion Jehanne of France (an allusion to Joan of Arc) — 'Dis, Blaise, sommes-nous bien loin de Montmartre?' (Say, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?). The poem is one of the most important documents of literary Cubism and the simultaneous book format anticipates the artist's book tradition of the later twentieth century.
What was Cendrars's relationship to the avant-garde?
Cendrars was the most genuinely cosmopolitan figure in the French avant-garde: he knew Apollinaire, Léger, Delaunay, Modigliani, and the entire Parisian modern art world; he had traveled to China, Russia, and the Americas before the other avant-gardists had left their home countries; and he had a quality of lived adventure — he had lost his right arm in the Foreign Legion at the Marne in 1915 — that gave his writing an authority the more bourgeois avant-gardists lacked. He was not, however, affiliated with any movement — he was not a surrealist, not a Dadaist, not a cubist — and this independence meant that his influence was indirect rather than programmatic. He was the model for the adventurer-writer that many of his contemporaries (Malraux, Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry) were also attempting to be.
What is La Main coupée?
La Main coupée (The Severed Hand, 1946) is Cendrars's account of his time in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, culminating in the battle of the Marne where he lost his right arm. The title is deliberately shocking — he writes about the arm, about the moment of its loss, about the phantom-limb sensations afterwards — and the book is one of the most direct accounts of the physical reality of the First World War available in French. Unlike Barbusse's Le Feu (1916) or Dorgelès's Les Croix de bois (1919), Cendrars's war account is written thirty years after the events, with the distance that allows him to be both absolutely precise about the physical details and able to frame the experience within the larger autobiography that La Main coupée is part of.
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