Review of The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle by Philippe Soupault

Another one-sitting read from Wakefield Press.

A surrealist tale of an outrageous journey to Greenland. The author is deliberately inaccurate, inhumane and self-described as “gratuitous.” The strange interjections, quotes and unconventional format mark it as an experiment piece, but it most engages on the level of subverting the reader’s expectations of the purpose and value of travel literature. One might ask, why would someone write such a spoof of travel literature but to turn the whole prospect of learning about another culture on its head? Perhaps he is commenting on Imperialism, making his protagonist another race from his own, another race who has seen historical oppression, further obscuring the authorial motive by doubly imposing one oppressed force upon another. The Introduction breaks down his source material’s original intent. This novella was heavily based on another account of a trip to Greenland. But instead of accomplishing anything spiritually satisfying, the protagonist here morphs into an unwholesome and weirdly insistent author of a false account of geographic and social conquest. Beneath the absurdist behavior is a backdrop of unforgiving wilderness and the bleak, unhallowed landscape of the human mind.