Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91

In 1880 a taciturn young Frenchman arrives at the Yemeni port of Aden, where he finds work as a foreman in a coffee warehouse. He is the poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell – a notorious figure in France but now, at the age of twenty five, determined to start a new life. In this atmospheric study of Rimbaud’s ‘lost years’, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of his life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in East Africa. We follow his trail in Somalia and Djibouti, in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo: a man on the run from his past, living out his famous teenage pronouncement, ‘ Je est un autre ’ – I is somebody else. "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 dogdays 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."--Provided by publisher In this compelling biography, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of Rimbaud's life as a trader, explorer, and gunrunner in Africa