About the Book
Isidore Isou was a young Jew in war-time Bucharest, and barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris where in 1945 he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and May '68.
In Speaking East Andrew Hussey presents a colourful picture of the post-war Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avant-garde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafes and Isou, as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis, gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank and had sex with the Parisian intellectual elite.
This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of the avant-garde.
About the Author :
Andrew Hussey was formerly Dean and Professor at the University of London in Paris. He has written for the New Statesman, the Observer and The New York Times, and his books include Paris, The Secret History which has been translated into a dozen languages and The French Intifada (2015) which was Sunday Times Book of the Week. He lives in Paris.
Review :
This fascinating biography, by an author extremely well-versed in Parisian cultural life . . . traces the turbulent life of a difficult man, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust to become “a theoretician of utopia”, with all its follies and splendours. Isou and the Lettrists are still little known and barely translated in this country – an omission which Speaking East, successfully, seeks to redress.
As Andrew Hussey puts it in his enthralling new biography, Isou is "grandiose, exasperating, self-regarding, brilliant,
piercing and poetic, often all in the space of the same page".
Riveting . . . Isou remains the least well known of the major avant-gardists of the 20th century. Following upon a major retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2019, Andrew Hussey’s rich biography aims to correct that oversight, providing an engaging, readable narrative of Isou’s multiple dimensions and sprawling ambitions.
Like Antonin Artaud before him, Isou lived his art. He also paid the price for it. In Hussey’s account he emerges as a man always on the brink. As his disciples betrayed him and his movement disintegrated, so too did his mind . . . Hussey writes kindly about this chapter of Isou’s life, without romanticising Isou’s illness or naively criticising psychiatry . . . Those who saw lettrisme as a confidence trick were pointing, whether they knew it or not, to its hysterical character. Isou was forever warding off – and so forever repeating – an experience of catastrophe.
Andrew Hussey’s book makes us understand how and why how and why Isou's art and thinking often took radical turns, painstakingly recreating the historical and cultural context of the place and the period against which the life of our Romanian character unfolds. Indeed, if we did not know from the beginning that we are dealing with a person and real facts, Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou can (also) be read like a novel.
Andrew Hussey’s beguiling biography, Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou, delivers a long and lush cultural cache that sympathetically – but also critically – conveys at last the complete story of the indefatigable Romanian-French theorist, poet, painter, film-maker, playwright, Left Bank megalomaniac intellectual, and rogue avant-gardist of avant-gardists; Isidore Isou. Hussey’s painstakingly researched writing here is masterfully performed and informed . . . this book is a vivid tour de force of readable precision – and a must have for art historians of late-Modernism and/or early-Conceptualism.
This is a fine biography, written with verve and wit and drawing on years of research. As always, Hussey wears his learning lightly and displays a knack for making difficult and apparently abstruse ideas seem absorbing and immediate. If there is a melancholy undertow, amplified by Isou’s later years of illness and isolation, it is that the era of the Parisian avant-gardes which melded revolutionary art and politics with the intent to change the world is consigned well and truly to the museum, the archive, the gallery retrospective and the literary biography.
Hussey is an engaging raconteur and his biography of Isou is a fine companion to his earlier work . . . In Speaking East, Hussey points out that Isou is "endlessly elusive," a biographical subject who is "full of contradictions, truths and untruths." And while Hussey succeeds in capturing "something of his extraordinary voice, his ideas, and his art," the book raises some questions about the biographer’s role. In the process of capturing Isou’s voice, Hussey slips into the role of the omniscient biographer, who claims to know the inner workings of his subject: what he was thinking, when, and why. It’s a technique, however, that succeeds; Isou emerges as a complex, dark, and charismatic figure, whose brief ascendance in the world of the post-war avant-garde is documented with panache.
A sympathetic account of an extraordinary life. Andrew Hussey has the depth of historical understanding necessary to do justice both to Isidore Isou’s glamorous, sometimes absurd, life as a hero of the Left Bank and to the horrors of the Romanian Holocaust he had escaped. This is an expertly told story about Paris, Europe and the interplay of private passion and public trauma.
Isou’s life is at once tragic and farcical: a whirling reprise of all of the twentieth century’s artistic avant gardes played out against the backdrop of Paris’s Left Bank in its heyday. Hussey is the ideal chronicler, and his biography, with its exuberant prose, both channels Isou’s restless creativity and positions it within the main currents of post-war French thought. Essential reading.
