Challenged by his friend, poet and art critic Max Jacob, to write a
novel, Pierre Reverdy produced this fragmented, beautiful assemblage of
loneliness, paranoia and depersonalization drawn from his own experience
of Paris in the early 20th century, the sometimes antagonistic
atmosphere of the avant-garde and his own troubled relationship with
Jacob, who tended to detect the threat of his literary treasures being
plagiarized among everyone he knew. Toward the end of his life, Reverdy
confirmed that the alienated, anxious "thief" of this novel in verse was
a portrait of himself ("Talant" conveys both the dual echo in French of
"talent" and the small town of Talan near Dijon, thereby evoking a
potential plagiarizer from the countryside), and "Abel the Magus," a
semi-satirical portrait of Jacob.
Originally published in French in 1917, The Thief of Talant is a
radical experiment in verse and narrative, a moving evocation of the
loss (and recovery) of self and an encrypted guidebook to the "heroic"
years of Cubism.
Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) was a reclusive yet integral component of
the early Parisian avant-garde and a friend to painters such as
Modigliani, Picasso and Gris, who, with fellow poets such as Apollinaire
and Jacob, came to represent a faction known as the "Cubist poets." In
1926, Reverdy withdrew from Paris for a life of seclusion in the
northwest of France.
