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.

I always have trouble with surrealist writing, typically it's a chore to get through and often there's a pseudo intellectual self-aggrandizing undercurrent present; I love Mallarmé and now Lautréamont, but can't stand the thinly veiled navel-gazing so terribly apparent in Breton and also Apollinaire. So it's generally late surrealism have a problem with; I think much like cubism (also a movement populated largely by incorrigible narcissists), it got too enamoured with itself and stopped separating the chaff from the corn and poisoned the whole supply in the process.