The last songs of autumn : the shadowy story of the mysterious Count of Lautreamont / Ruy Camara ; [translated by John Jensen ]

Tragic fate pursues Isidore Ducasse from his childhood, when, at the age of two, he witnesses the suicide of Clestine, his mother, on Christmas Eve 1847. When he is thirteen, due to epidemics and wars in Uruguay, the boy is put on a ship by his father, Franois Ducasse, to be educated in the south of France. There he suffers horrific anguish and resists the approaches of paedophiles within the scholastic prisons of Tarbes and Pau. At the age of eighteen, holding a baccalaureate and with some of his unfinished Songs in hand he takes on the pseudonym "Count of Lautramont" and enters the literary world of Paris and Brussels. Rejected by publishers, the young writer, a precursor of surrealism, abandons his studies and takes on a life of luxury at his father's expense. When everything begins to go well in the life of this precocious dandy, contemporary of Mallarm, behold, his father deserts him. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War breaks out. Decadence overtakes his guardian, the banker Jean Darasse, leading him into bankruptcy as he does with Franois Ducasse, leaving him practically penniless in South America, a region that is also in flames. At the age of twenty-four and profoundly depressed at the carnage of bodies piling up in the streets of Paris, the young writer ingests a mortal cocktail and picks up his razor, thus fulfilling his prophecy: "Upon awakening, my razor, opening a pathway across my neck, will prove that nothing, actually, is more true..."

Translated from the Portuguese.