I did read Haunted House; at first, I read each line over and over, until I completely understood it, lines like:
The sensitive and white man consigned to all the offshore winds, to all the caprices of fortune; he who lacks the motor of shame, the perches of friendship, the breeze from the magnetic crowds.
(Did you notice that sentence is lacking a verb?) But after a few pages, I began to feel that I was misunderstanding the book, by understanding it. Perhaps the book is meant to be painted onto your soul, like a Boy Scout painting a model of a Piper Cub, not thought over like an economics essay in Fortune magazine. And maybe the book would eventually have a plot! Perhaps one involving a haunted house, like the captivating lithograph on the cover, executed by Rodolphe Bresdin in 1871.
But the plot, if it did appear, happened in a corner of the book’s persona, or at the very end.
They have placed a medal on a hole in the dead man’s chest.
That’s a line from the penultimate page of this book, the 69th. Perhaps Haunted House, written in 1930, was opposed to war? I realize I know nearly nothing about Pierre Reverdy, except for the paragraph on the back cover, entitled "About the Author." And maybe I should not learn about Pierre, maybe I should read more of his books — in French — because English seems to shortchange his thinking, to legalize it. For example:
Deep within him, he who speaks now has also discovered all the treachery of these dangerous regions wherein anyone so imprudent as to venture is engulfed without reprieve.
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