Adventures in Reading

Charles Baudelaire, Collected Poems

First of all, God bless you, Carcanet, for putting out complete-ish editions at reasonable prices. (Also, if you don't know, you can pretty much always engage in book price arbitrage by ordering from LRB Bookshop or Blackwell's.)

It helped, I think, that the collection began with Paris Spleen, and Flowers of Evil was toward the back. It also helped that I began it on a very hot Halloween night as I waited for trick-or-treaters: this is not the poetry of feeling good, but it is the poetry of feeling vaguely uneasy, or understanding exactly why you are uneasy. After a hundred pages it does get a little redundant--the downsides of consuming a lifetime of work all at once--but the appeal is easy to see, now, Balzac giving way to Zola, the rise of the flaneur, Paris in a time of industrialization and political and social upheaval, what it is like to witness something becoming modern as it happens.