The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most unusual works of Charles Nodier, and can readily be seen as a remote precursor of Alfred Jarry's "pataphysics," Guillaume Apollinaire's "surrealism" and Dadaism. Originally published in 1830, more than a hundred years before the publication of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Nodier's novel, like...