ABSTRACT
Marcel Moreau’s reputation is associated with the aggressively distinctive style that he has polished over the decades, a style whose instantly recognizable features owe less to flashy verbal brilliance or eccentric punctuation than to a sure mastery of sound and syntax. In Amours à en mourir (1988), as in the numerous other books of this Belgian author born in 1933, the prose is marked by startling assonance and alliteration, as well as by the sometimes unorthodox and thus grammatically dauntless use of pre-posed adjectives, whence the “instinctive,” “primitive,” “explosive” rhythms—Moreau’s own terms—that echo long in the reader’s ear. The writer also wields puns of the grim, somber kind, as the (mostly untranslatable) titles of some of his earlier works indicate: Les Arts viscéraux (1975), À dos de Dieu (1980), Orgambide ou l’ordure lyrique (1980), Moreaumachie (1982), and Issue sans issue (1986). The latter, “Exitless Exit,” sums up quite well the philosophical axiom on which his oeuvre is based.
