Locus SolusRaymond RousselLabel: Calder Publications LtdDescription: Based like the earlier Impressions of Africa on uniquely eccentric principles of composition this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. Cantarel a scholarly scientist whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity is taking a group of visitors on a tour of Locus Solus his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which when activated by the weather creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.