[a:Zadie Smith|2522|Zadie Smith|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1241800089p2/2522.jpg] gave a wonderful review of this in the October Harpers. Excerpt:

He is obsessively enthusiastic about Rimbaud, and so, like his fellow devotees, is profoundly, perhaps irrationally interested in whether or not Rimbaud smoked opium out there in the jungle, or had a lover, or took the Prins van Oranje steamer or a local phinisi schooner on his return journey — all of which it’s impossible to know. Such speculations fascinate James, and he weaves the possibilities into his understanding of the poetry, and of the man. If it all sounds too whimsical at first (it did to me, reading the blurb), you soon realize that the best reason to stick with Rimbaud in Java is not for the facts or the fantasy but for the spectacle of reading someone write beautifully about something he finds, well, beautiful.

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This book is an attempt by James to monetize his research and time spent working on a failed novel of the same subject, Rimbaud's journey through Java. I appreciate his candor in admitting that he never could have written good dialogue for Rimbaud--still I think I would have preferred to read the novel rather than this meandering little book. It seems thrown together, the writing isn't great, and I don't even totally trust his research: why does he say the pyramids in Egypt were built by slaves, for example, and why didn't he feel the need to include a bibliography? (He explains at the end that he feels he has sufficiently cited other works throughout his book, and so a bibliography seems unnecessary. Really it just seems lazy.)

The bits about colonialism and orientalism are the least organized and focused. For a better discussion of these topics I recommend "Colonialism and Homosexuality" by Robert Aldrich. The bits about Rimbaud are a nice primer on the poet, and I liked James's recommendations for further reading on Rimbaud.

This is the second trite book I've read by James. I picked up "Andrew and Joey" years ago at a gamelan performance in a hotel in Jakarta. It was a fun book, but, like this one, it was kind of pointless. ( )