Miserable Miracle

Description

In Miserable Miracle, Henri Michaux, one of twentieth-century France's finest poets and also an extraordinary graphic artist, tells of his life-altering and mortifying encounter with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, Michaux's book is a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) left his native Belgium at a young age to travel around the world - first as a sailor in the French Merchant Marine, then to gather material for his writing, and finally to learn more about various mystical religions. He settled in Paris, where he began to attract some notice as a writer, editor, and painter but remained largely unknown until his friend Andre Gide published a study of his work. After the death of his wife in the late 1940s, he experimented heavily with mescaline and other drugs but, after concluding that he had "no gift for addiction," found other inspiration for his Surrealist writings and paintings.