I am indebted to other reviews and especially to the long - and invaluable – introduction (nearly 20% of the published book) for my understanding of this, to me, rather odd and impenetrable novel. On one level it is simply an adventure story about a young bandit called Laurence who gets involved in increasingly violent acts of derring-do, and his love for an ethereal maiden called Ivlita. I can see that it can be enjoyed on this surface level (although to be honest I personally didn’t enjoy it) but it is in fact a multi-layered text with many allusions and subtexts and it really needs an expert to fully grasp its meaning. In Paul E Richardson’s helpful review on Amazon he states that it isn’t the story line or characters that matter but the words with which they are created, the subtexts and literary references. However, I do in fact look for story and character when I read a novel and there was nothing here to engage me. Knowing it is clever and a major work of the Russian avant-garde doesn’t compensate for a somewhat fantastical tale and the mixture of “slapstick and philosophy” didn’t work for me. Having said that, as a lover of all things Russian, I was delighted to discover this writer, whose life story is for me far more interesting than his novel, and even if I didn’t much enjoy it, I was equally delighted to discover this little-known work of Russian modernism.

Lovely, lyrical, but difficult to reach beneath the surface. An interesting read.

I sorted of floated on the top of this novel - the lyricism is both a boon and a burden in that respect. You can admire this work but not quite touch it and that distance impaired my reading experience. I'm not usually a person that needs to connect with characters, really, but here it's just a bit too much.

The opening introduction is informative and written in accessible and pleasing way - engaging, even - presenting this irrepressible personality, the author of a surrealist novel - in his last years best friends with Picasso - he was an artist, novelist and book publisher, poet and stirrer-upper - a russian in Paris. Excellent discovery for me (he even tried to partake in resistance fighting in Franco's Spain). What an amazing man, and he is presented sympathetically and fully contextualised - how russians away from their country lived in urban settings not always congenial - but i was expecting a dry novel - and that's not what i got! 'Rapute' is as witty and sexy as its author must have been to keep the company he kept (and several wives) - it follows a man of brio attempting to commit heartfelt crimes just to do it, and to distinguish himself - and then the stakes are raised when he meets a stunning woman, hidden away - now he has a focus ... and things go from there - for better or for worse? We are left asking. I was truly surprised - what a revelation. I'm thrilled that Columbia and Kitson whose introduction is sensational, as i mentioned, have brought this back into the light of day, revealing what surrealist scholars have known for a long while.

DNF, after a third. This, the only surviving novel to have been published in the author's time, should have come to life a whole lot more than it did, even if it took the author's customary modernist poetry and inventions of words and sounds to do so. As it is, it's just waffle, with remote mountain villages and a man new to murder making himself out to be a big 'I am' gangster. Things happen, but really nowhere near enough, nor with enough clarity, and you have to assume the allegories and references mentioned in the scholarly introduction are what keep the pages alive for some. For the average reader, such as myself, they're too woolly. I was promised some sparkling bits of narrative play late on, with characters being completely indefinable as regards basics like good and evil, but wilted in the eye of the mediocre long before then.