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Chargement... A Rendezvous in Averoigne: The Best Fantastic Tales of Clark Ashton Smith (original 1988; édition 1988)par Clark Ashton Smith (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreA Rendezvous in Averoigne [collection] par Clark Ashton Smith (1988)
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Doomed, all doomed! ( ) My reaction to reading this collection in 2005. Uncharacteristically, I do not list every story in the collection. "Introduction", Ray Bradbury -- Very brief introduction in which Bradbury talks about his first exposure to Smith's work. "The Holiness of Azédarac", Clark Ashton Smith -- This is one of Smith's medieval stories set in the fictional French area of Averoigne. It exhibits a certain cynicism about religion (at least medieval Christianity) and, to a lesser extant, women. A young Brother Ambrose discovers that the Bishop of Ximes, Azédarac, is corrupt and a worshiper of dark gods. Specifically, he worships -- or at least evokes -- Dagon and Iog-Sotôt aka H. P. Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth. His library doesn't contain the Necronomicon , but it does have Smith's own addition to the collection of sorcerous tomes -- The Book of Eibon. The Bishop is also said -- and his exact age, as well as his ultimate fate, is unclear -- to have Hypoborean lore -- a reference to another invented world of Smith's which was also utilized by Lovecraft. This exhibits the casual, joking and not at all systematic way Lovecraft and his friends accretted props around Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.) Fearing that he will reveal this to the Archbishop, Azédarac's henchman slips the Brother a potion which transports him back in time to the Druids. "The Colossus of Ylourgne" -- This story has one powerful central image (as befits the poetically talented Smith): a huge corpse composed of the revived bodies of various dead people. The dwarfish sorceror Nathaire, angry at the people of Averoigne, renders bone and flesh down from corpses and uses them to build a huge creature "The End of the Story" -- Another of Smith's Averoigne stories. This one is relatively late, set in 1789. It's protagonist, a young lawyer, stumbles, in his travels, on a monastery with a library rich in scholastic treasures. The abbot gives him access to every book -- except one which he says the is dangerous to the narrator because he is "young, ardent, full of desires and curiosities". Of course, it's the one book the narrator takes steps to secretly look at and thus discovers the tale of one Gérard de Venteillon who, in the ruins of the Château des Faussesflammes, meets a satyr who promises that he will him forget Christ and his fiance and turn his back on the world for the beauty of hidden "pagan ecstasies". "A Rendezvous in Averoigne" -- This is a somewhat peculiar tale,ambiguous in its ending. The setup is relatively straight forward. The troubadour protagonist is on his way to an assignation with the noble woman Fleurette and comes across an illusionary house people by the legendary and vampiric Sieur du Malinbois and his wife, a house actually above their tomb. The protagonist notes the seeming enthrallment of Fleurette who is also captured by the vampires. But, after killing both of the vampires, Smith does something very different than the usual happy ending. "The Last Incantation" -- The first of the collection's stories to capture the flavor of Smith's poetry. The great and powerful sorcerer and necromancer Malygris is dying and puts all his learning and skill to resurrecting Nylissa. She is his first love, a "slender and innocent child" who loved him and who he loved dearly before his ambition and drive to master the dark arts made him the feared figure he is now. "The Death of Malygris" -- The Malygris of the title is the necromancer of the earlier (in time and composition) "The Last Incantation". I liked this story telling how the other sorcerers of Susran, unable to tell if the feared and powerful Malygris is dead. He is a sorcerer so powerful that the tribute keeps coming though he has not given any sign in over a year that he is still alive. The structure of the tale is somewhat odd. "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" -- I'm not sure if I was supposed to see more than "ironic" reversal in this story. In the past, on the island of Poseidonis (seemingly the setting of many of Smith's Atlantis stories), two brothers resign themselves to the death of Atlantis and their culture, the futility of the attempts to preserve their culture from the sea. "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" -- This is something of a moralistic biter-bitten tale set in Hyperborea, Smith's world that H. P. Lovecraft partially used in some stories including the god here, the toadish Tsathoggua. Avoosl Wuthoqquan is the most rapacious money-lender in the Hyperborean city of Commoriom. After he refuses to give a beggar some money in exchange for some prophecies, the beggar gives him a "prophecy gratis", specifically that the treasures of earth will allure and ensnare him. "The Seven Geases" -- This is a fascinating story. In its motif of cosmic indifference repeated seven times as protagonist Lord Ralibar Vooz is cursed by a wizard, whose incantations he has disturbed, to travel below Hyperborea and meet several of the Old Ones including Tsathoggua. "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" -- The city of Commoriom which Avoosl Wuthoqquan comes from in "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" and Vooz hails from in "The Seven Geases" is now a city deserted for centuries and shrouded in jungle. "The Coming of the White Worm" -- This haunting story -- haunting because Smith is masterful in using his poetic talents to create an eerie story full of villages falling under a wave of sorcerous cold -- probably works especially well on me because I've always had a fondness for stories in icy settings. The frozen village, the bloated Rlim Shaikorth using the magicians he has spared for food, and the ships, at the beginning of the story, full of leprously white and dead crews are particularly powerful images. "The City of the Singing Flame" -- The ranking of Smith is usually first poet, then fantasist, and then sf writer. This is his most famous sf story. (Bradbury specifically mentions it in his introduction to the collection.) It's a fine story. I suspect it's origin is very simple: a sf takeoff on the aphorism "like moths to a flame". "The Dweller in the Gulf" -- An effective story, part of a small series of stories that Smith did set on a dusty Mars full of ancient ruins and degenerate aliens. (One suspects this may have had an influence on writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore.) "The Chain of Aforgomon" -- This is an interesting story about a man placed under a curse, in one of his past lives, by Aforgomon, "god of the minutes and the cycles". The protagonist's past self blames the god for taking his beloved away and casts a blasphemous spell to meet her for one hour. "Genius Loci" -- I'm beginning to think that obsession and compulsion are two large themes in Smith's works. As with his "The End of the Story" and "The City of the Singing Flame", this is a story of an unhealthy compulsion. Here a landscape artist falls under the sway of a unwholesome place of meadow and pool. "The Maze of Maal Dweb" -- Another impressive story from Smith, here at his most baroque and outre as well as showing the usual themes of frustrated desires and ennui. The story has a somewhat typical beginning. Tiglari, the protagonist, is on a mission to rescue his beloved from the clutches of the "all-wise, the all-powerful" sorceror Maal Dweb who has his own uses for beautiful women. Tiglari enters Maal Dweb's mountaintop palace where, despite his hunter skill, he is caught be the wizard who sentences him to find his love Athlé in his maze. "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" -- This 1932 story stands, I suspect, close to the source of a whole sub-sub-genre of sf horror: the alien parasites who, having destroyed at alien race, wait in their ruins for new prey -- namely us. This story belongs to the same setting as Smith's "The Dweller in the Gulf". The degenerate Yorhis have been absent from Mars for at least 40,000 years, and we find out, in an expedition to excavate one of their cities, what happened to them. "The Uncharted Isle" -- This simple, eerie story has one of the most memorable lines in Smith's fiction. A shipwrecked sailor comes across a strange island with strange people who seem obsessed with escaping the island -- and incapable of noticing him. "The Planet of the Dead" -- This story is another striking example of a Smith character racked by dissatisfaction and boredom with his life to the point where he regrets escaping destruction. Protagonist Francis Melchior is an antiques dealer by trade and an astronomer by avocation. One night, when observing a star, he finds himself unaccountably transported in spirit to a far planet where he is the poet Antarion madly in love with Thameera. He is reunited with her in the decadent necropolis of Saddoth. "Master of the Asteroid", Clark Ashton Smith -- There's a bit of the flavor of Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym about this story of shipboard madness and shipwreck and odd entities encountered in distant places -- all narrated, as with Poe's story, in the first person. A group of misfits steals a ship from Mars. Madness strikes some of the three; violence ensues. "The Empire of the Necromancers" -- This is Smith at his most decadent and baroque. "The Charnel God" -- Another Zothique story -- Zothique is Earth's last continent -- with a necromancer. Here traveler Phariom desperately tries to rescue his wife Elaith from the mysterious priesthood of the town of Zul-Bha-Sair. They may or may not consume their dead, may even kill people to take them to their subterranean halls. "Xeethra" -- This tale from 1934 reminded me very much of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Quest for Iranon" from 1921. Both feature humble figures, here a goat herder, in search of a dream realm they are sure they belong to. Rendezvous in Averoigne is a comprehensive, if not exhaustive, collection of Clark Ashton Smith's short fiction. A Weird Tales contributor and member of the Lovecraft Circle, Smith wrote like a sort of extraterrestrial version of Edgar Allan Poe. Although the title of this book refers to the imaginary medieval setting of Averoinge (compare James Branch Cabell's Poictesme), its contents span across the various settings and story cycles deployed in Smith's oeuvre. After "Averoigne" follow "Atlantis," "Hyperborea," assorted "Lost Worlds," and then most fully "Xothique" (the "last continent"). Each of these stories has a lapidary merit that rewards repeat reading, and I have been able to return to this volume with pleasure many times over the twenty years I've owned it. There are no dependable themes throughout; the reliable common denominator is the beauty of Smith's language, and his ability to communicate a sense of the alien and the abominable. Noted weird fiction critic S.T. Joshi has dismissed Smith's stories as superficial, but to my reading they often have profound contents. As an example, I recently re-read the Zothique tale "Necromancy in Naat," and realized that its household of three necromancers was the centerpiece of an inverted gospel of the post-Christian far future, in which Yadar and Dalili -- twisted from Joseph and Mary -- come to the three magi, rather than the magi to them. And the guiding influence is a black ocean current, rather than starlight. The inaugurating event of the narrative is death, rather than birth. And Dalili is magically sterile, rather than miraculously fertile. There is to be no redeeming death, since the liches stumble along even after the expiration of the magi. And the curious episode in which a local cannibal is fed to the demon Esrit is a symbolic criticism of the Christian Eucharist that is beyond my powers to gloss! This book also includes an introduction by Ray Bradbury and deliciously surreal illustrations by Jeffrey K. Potter. I don't think there's any bad place to start reading Smith, but if you had to confine yourself to a single volume of his work, this might well be the one to choose. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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These 30 stories represent the nightmarish world of the master of horror. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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