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Charles Nicholl
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Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91 (Eland Classics) Paperback – July 23, 2021

by Charles Nicholl (Author)
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 27 ratings
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Rimbaud was the original enfant terrible. A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dog days of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, ‘the lost years’, is the subject of this biographical quest.

Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud’s life as a trader, explorer, and gun-runner. We catch his trail in Somalia, in the alleys of Djibouti, up in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo with twenty pounds of gold strapped around his waist, and escorting a camel-train of Remington rifles across the Danakil desert.
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  1. Print length
    344 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Eland Publishing
  4. Publication date
    July 23, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    5.75 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1780601697
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1780601694
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Charles Nicholl has written about history, biography, and travel but brings all these disciplines together as a literary detective. Subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, and Leonardo da Vinci. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recipient of the Hawthornden prize, and has won the James Tait Black prize for biography and the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Gold Dagger’ award. He has also presented documentary programs on television and has lectured in Britain, Italy, and the United States. He lives in Lucchesia in Italy with his wife and children and is a visiting Professor at Sussex University.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Eland Publishing (July 23, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 344 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1780601697
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1780601694
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 27 ratings

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Charles Nicholl

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Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
27 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

David Havelka
4.0 out of 5 stars An exciting read on a wilde child who grows up to be a MAN!
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2009
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This review really answered a lot of questions about Rimbaud, and gave his legend a needed demystification. Put a lot of Rimbaud's poetry into context of a troubled adolescent seeking a father figure, freedom from a domineering mother, and of course alcholism...I for one found Rimbaud's poetry and legend among the cultural elite to be a bore, but his life was very exciting. A good read....
One person found this helpful
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Robert Podgurski
5.0 out of 5 stars A bio that reads like an adventure as it should
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2015
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Nicholl is sharp once again. A bio that reads like an adventure as it should, a reinvention as such that Rimbaud would have approved of.
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A. Hickman
4.0 out of 5 stars A Season in Hell
Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2007
I've never really appreciated Rimbaud's poetry. Perhaps that's understandable, given that I'm not a linguist and that, for me at least, there's always something a little suspect about poems in translation. This is no doubt my loss. However, I've always liked a good read, and the one about Rimbaud, poet and traveler, who gave up his muse while still in his teens and left Europe for Africa, where he was rumored to be a gun runner and slaver, is a damned good tale. Charles Nicholl, author of "Borderlines" and "The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe,' does it ample justice in his memoir "Somebody Else," subtitled "Arthur Rimbaud in Africa: 1880-1891." Actually, the first quarter or so of the book is given over to the poet's formative years, including his well-documented relationship with Paul Verlaine, the older poet who came under the spell of Arthur's often-violent persona (and strikingly beautiful eyes), regarding him as the quintessential poète maudit. Readers familiar with the Agnieszka Holland film, "Total Eclipse" (1995) may be forgiven for interpolating an image of Leonardo DiCaprio for that of the real Rimbaud, but one look at the Carjat photograph on the cover of Nicholl's book should be enough to set them straight. More reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn in "Sylvia Scarlet" than the ever-wholesome DiCaprio, the photo hauntingly portrays Rimbaud's "hooded frightening eye" and somewhat cruel mouth at age seventeen. But Nicholl is more concerned with the "somebody else," also portrayed on the cover of my Vintage (1998) edition of the book: a Rimbaud self-portrait (the poet briefly took up photography in Harrar), arms folded and wearing a white smock, that has him looking, a year or two shy of thirty, more like a product of Bedlam than Hollywood. This is the man who turned his back on poetry and dedicated himself to exile, settling for eleven years in East Africa, where he developed a single-minded desire to succeed at some aspect of trade. Whether he became a gun runner or slaver (Nicholl is ambivalent on both points, but his apology for slavery as it existed in the late 19th century fails to convince) is still debated, but Rimbaud's early death, at age 37, in 1891, renders the question essentially moot. "Somebody Else" is meticulously researched (quotes from later travelers such as Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell are especially welcome) and a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the "other" Rimbaud.
7 people found this helpful
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O. S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Charles Nicholl's biographies
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2010
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Thank you Charles for "illuminating" this mystery man. You give readers such great insight into character and local in your marvelous biographies. "The Lodger" Shakespeare. "Flights of the Mind" Da Vinci and "Somebody Else" Rimbaud are all terrific reads. Orville Stoeber
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floeck
3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2014
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Had to give it away the picture pages were stuck together
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Daniel Myers
4.0 out of 5 stars Well-Written, But What A Downer
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2001
As another reviwer has already stated, this book will not definitively answer the question that so many lovers of Rimbaud ask. To wit, "Why did he stop writing?"-But the book is a well-researched and well-written account of Rimmbaud as "un autre," somebody else than a poet...But it's all so grindingly depressing. Yes, Rimbaud had incredible endurance and will and courage. But he had no business acumen as the accounts of his many endeavors in the world of commerce amply illustrate. The book is essentially a tale of his slow degeneration in body, if not spirit.-I used to have a friend who loved Rimbaud more than I do who would call me in the middle of the night drunkenly, tearfully asking me why he quit. Well, there was nothing I could say at 3 A. M. that he would remember the next morning.-But what I feel is that the answer lies in Rimbaud's most famous poem, "Le Bateau Ivre." At the end of the poem, he says that, after all the exhilarating and mystical insights, after all the rapturous visions amidst the mad seastorms, there is nothing he would like better now then to return to being a litle boat being pushed across a placid pond by a little boy. Rimbaud had been through more hell in his life by the end of his teens than would fit in the lives of many a tortured soul.-It's really not so remarkable when you consider it that, his poetry unrecognized, his soul tortured by the relationship with Verlaine and the other atrocities and privations he endured that the young man would flee the literary world that had given him nothing but anguish in the end.-Unfortunately , the world to which he fled offered little in the way of compensation, as this book sadly chronicles. I recommend this book to those who, like myself, had no clear idea of exactly what Rimbaud DID after he stopped writing besides vague ideas of his being a gun-runner, slave-trader and amputee (This book, by the way, casts serious doubts over whether he was ever either of the former two, except perhaps when forced to do so by bad luck and necessity).-So, all in all, a sad but informative work.-I still think the last lines of "Le Bateau Ivre" are the key to why he stopped writing. But, as is commmonplace, you can't go home again, as those last lines express a yearning for. This book is an excellent chronicle of the alternative Rimbaud was forced to accept.
23 people found this helpful
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barhayim
2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2017
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not pleased at all very rudimentary not interesting material
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Bruce Strachan
4.0 out of 5 stars Review from THE ETHIOPIAN REVIEW OF BOOKS
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2011
Charles Nicholl's study of Arthur Rimbaud is engaging, fascinating and rewarding. We can't but deeply sympathise with this person's endless foils and struggles when searching for self. The narrative proclaims that that self might've been somewhere, or somebody else. But of course it wasn't. Rimbaud was never not himself: tireless explorer of what it is to be.

To read this review in its entirety go to THE ETHIOPIAN REVIEW OF BOOKS:

[...]
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Top reviews from other countries

sunbambino
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Savage' Rimbaud
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2019
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This is a considered and measured approach to the last years in the Horn of Africa, imaginatively written, well researched, highly recommended
One person found this helpful
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Peter Murrell
4.0 out of 5 stars I did wonder whether he gave up poetry so suddenly because he had exhausted what he wanted to say or was simply disgusted by the
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2016
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The biographer of Rimbaud in his later years has the problem not only that his subject was not a very likeable person but that not much happened. He endured privations in the African heat, he traded, he made some arduous journeys, then his health failed and he died in his thirties. Of course, the fact that he was a precocious poet in his teens, whose fame continued to grow long after he lost interest in poetry, gives a certain fascination to the later years. The material for those years is thin but it has been assiduously gathered by Nicholl and he presents it well. I just found at the end that I didn't much care about Rimbaud's fate. I did wonder whether he gave up poetry so suddenly because he had exhausted what he wanted to say or was simply disgusted by the artistic life he led in Paris and elsewhere. Nicholl is unable to provide any definitive answers since Rimbaud would immediately change the subject if anyone mentioned his earlier years. I confess the poetry (extracts of which are quoted) has no appeal for me whatsoever, which adds to my overall lack of engagement in the story.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2016
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perfect
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Laurence
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2013
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The author manages to write a fascinating account of the last years of Rimbaud with relatively limited historical information. Excellent.
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Immortalist
1.0 out of 5 stars I developed a headache!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2015
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I purchased this biography after seen the film Total Eclipse Total Eclipse (film) with Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio).

I was looking forward to the read. I stopped reading when I got to page 30. I absolutely could not stand the fact that this book had so much French words/sentences/phrases. And the style of writing, it did not agree with me. I developed a headache.
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