On Elegance While Sleeping

The first English translation of the self-proclaimed “Viscount” Emilio Lascano Tegui — a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, and a larger-than-life eccentric in his own right—On Elegance While Sleeping is the deliciously macabre novel, part Maldoror and part Dorian Gray, that established its author’s reputation as a renegade hero of Argentine literature. It tells the story, in the form of a surreal diary, of a lonely, syphilitic French soldier, who — after too many brothels and disappointments — returns from Africa longing for a world with more elegance. He promptly falls in love with a goat, and recalls the time, after a childhood illness, when his hair fell out and grew back orange — a phenomenon his doctor attributed to the cultivation of carrots in a neighboring town. Disturbing, provocative, and mesmerizing, On Elegance While Sleeping charts the decline of a man unraveling due to his own oversensitivity — and drifting closer and closer to committing a murder.