Rimbaud to Rambo

Derangement of the senses is what Bruce Duffy has achieved in his astonishing novel about Rimbaud, “Disaster Was My God.’’ Ten years ago he caused a critical sensation with his fictional portrait of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Portrait hardly describes it: It was an incursion that made its way past biography’s guard towers to exfiltrate time’s hostage. His Wittgenstein is coolly exploring, whimsically skeptical of his own explorations and, above all, with a living voice that renders intellectual complexities as traits of human character.

“Disaster’’ is hot where its predecessor was cool. Duffy has matched his subject’s temperature and tumult. His novel is a forge upon which he has placed biographical facts and bent, shaped and sometimes changed altogether so as to take what is known of Rimbaud and fit it to the great unknown that has goaded at readers, critics, and biographers for a century and a half. Namely, how to reconcile five years of blazing poetry, written between ages 16 and 21, with his sudden abandonment and eventual reemergence as gunrunner and coffee merchant among the desert clans of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the last 12 years of his 37-year life.

Our long tradition of quasi-religious reverence for the artist is scandalized. Art, brief; gunrunning, long? Beethoven declares he can hear perfectly well, doesn’t care for music, and opens a Wursthaus.

By an extraordinary feat of fictional imagination, Duffy has joined artist and gunrunner. That they are one and the same is conveyed, technically, by the rapid alternation of scenes portraying, on one hand, the boy poet and ruthless erupter into the existence of Verlaine, his patron and lover; and on the other, the brutal desert merchant, ill with a cancerous leg and struggling to get back to France.