Les Filles du feu: suivi de Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval

Les Filles du feu: suivi de Aurélia Reviews

• 
  Denis

  Nerval is one of those mythic figures of French literature that I learned about in high school, and whose poems I had to learn by heart at fifteen, without quite understanding their meaning nor their importance. Yet, the strangeness of Nerval's world (added to his tragic fate) is so unique that, somehow, something stayed with me, and I knew I was bound to revisit him one day later in my life. Les filles du feu (Girls of the Fire) is an extremely bizarre but haunting collection of short stories that define and illustrate romanticism as French writers of the XIXe century saw it. Aurélia, one of the writer's most famous texts, could have been part of that collection, and it makes sense to read it immediately afterwards. Nerval's inner world is extremely complex, filled with symbols, magic, fantasy, and mysticism, and is complicated by the fact that, as the writer was impaired by mental illness, his writing reflects that aspect of his life: fiction and reality blend in disturbing, vertiginous ways. One could say Nerval is an acquired taste, and the stories are definitely uneven. But it's hard to resist their charms - Sylvie, for example, is an exquisite masterpiece whose melancholy and evocation of love has had a profound impact on many writers (it personally sent me back to Alain Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes). Nerval's writing is delicate and literary, although it may appear old-fashioned to some modern readers. Mysterious foreign lands, the cult of deities like Isis, a recurrent obsession with ethereal women, doomed loves, hallucinatory visions that may be real or not, are some of the themes that link those stories together. To dive more into Nerval's obsessions, though, his poems remain astonishing glimpses of the mind of a genius on the verge of madness.
• 
  Ulysse

  Angélique and Sylvie were simply unforgettable. Read them.
  
  The final story, Aurélia, which was not originally published as a Fille du Feu because Nerval had missed the deadline, belongs in a whole other category. Call it Nerval's season in Hell. At first it reads like the ravings of a madman. I couldn't make heads or tail of it. The words slipped through my mind like water and left no imprint there. I've never liked hearing or reading about other people's dreams. Makes me want to curl up and go to sleep on the spot. Three quarters into the story I was about ready to throw in the towel. But I fought to keep my eyelids open and kept on, trusting one hailed by some of my favorites, from Proust to Cendrars, as a poet with a vision of incomparable beauty. I was not disappointed. Nerval's journey to the end of the night is one that results ultimately in a deeper understanding of the self. And the incandescent light that blazed through the final words flashed a brief instant on the windows of my mind and was gone.
• 
  mlle-cassis

  Recueil très disparate, peu d'unité entre les différents textes: d'une nouvelle à l'autre on passe du rocambolesque lol d'une quasi chanson de geste ("Angélique", génial) au récit initiatique onirique ("Sylvie") en passant par le western avec les aventures de la jeune Jemmy en pays indien ("Jemmy"), mais aussi des pièces plus sombres ("Aurélia" ou la quête de l'étoile, ou la descente dans les enfers de la folie) carrément chiantes (oh!)(si).
  
  Nerval est peut-être l'auteur du Desdichado ("Je suis le ténébreux, le veuf, l'inconsolé" etc.), il sait aussi faire preuve de grandes ressources en matière d'humour. Pas mal, pour un type qui a fini fou, puis suicidé (hum).
  
  Une bonne surprise.
• 
  Svenja

  I love Nervals style. It's deep and layered but not heavy. He writes several stories in this book - all mystical, romantic, almost fairy-tale-like and yet all tragic.
• 
  Paul Kerschen

  Aurélia probably stands next to Akutagawa's Cogwheels as an account of mental breakdown that draws its force from the powers of description having kept marvelously intact.