One of those French books that has somehow fallen through the cracks and failed to take root in the English speaking cannon, (see also Salammbô, or all of Flaubert actually - sans Bovary).

I tried, and failed miserably, to read this in the original - I've previously managed to stumble and stammer my way through most French classics, armed only with a trusty Cambridge bilingual dictionary, intermediate French and some misplaced confidence, and that has generally more than sufficed for Hugo, Rimbaud et all but here I could barely even get through the first canto and by the end I begrudgingly admitted defeat and switched to a translation (by the by, I recommend Alexis Lykiard's).

It's not a very long book, and it's quite similar content-wise to Prometheus Unbound or Paradise Lost in that it's about fighting against God, in a more or less literal sense. Prose-wise, of course, it has little in common with the other two - this is one of the Ur-texts of surrealism, and by far one of the best.