Charles Baudelaire

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THE WRITER OF MODERN LIFE: ESSAYS ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

By Walter Benjamin

Edited by Michael W. Jennings

Belknap Press, $15.95, 307 pages

REVIEWED BY LESLIE H. WHITTEN JR.

What's going on here? Why the sudden interest in Charles Baudelaire, a 19th-century French poet? Evidence of this fascination abounds. A 14-year-old kid goes to a reading of Baudelaire translations and starts memorizing them. The bestselling Lemony Snicket novels star "the Baudelaire orphans;" French-milled soaps, chic knitted socks, a record label, a t-shirt line and at least two hotels are also named after the eponymous Frenchman.

And, if you can believe it, Google by a recent count had more items on Baudelaire than on Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot combined. (Well, who would want Allen Ginsberg soap or a story about the "T. S. Eliot Orphans?")

Now comes "The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire," edited by Princeton University professor Michael Jennings, and based on the writings of Walter Benjamin, a long dead German genius. Benjamin dissects the author of "Les Fleurs du Mal" ("The Flowers of Evil") with a Marxist scalpel, among other unusual literary procedures.

Why is all this happening? Maybe because in a unique way we fearful and confused souls recognize that Baudelaire's mordant and yet often exquisitely beautiful poetry and screwed-up life are a kind of mirror noir of our own teetering times. The same violent deaths, political treacheries, religious confrontations -- and yet brief Roman candle bursts of loveliness are there.