Kernok the Pirate

In 1823 - he was then 19 years old - after a two-year apprenticeship, Eugene Sue was posted to the hospitals of the 11th Military Division of Bayonne, and soon embarked on the expedition of the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis. He went to Madrid, then to Andalusia where he treated the wounded at the Battle of Trocadero and was then assigned to the military hospital of Cadiz where he remained until 1825. Tempted by literature, he resigned in 1825 and left for Paris where he met his friends, Honore de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas; a joyous band that enjoyed exploring the countryside around Paris, Montreuil, Bagnolet, and Montmorency. They were young, without worry, and the girls were attractive ... But Eugene was soon in debt; In 1826, his father sent him away to serve as a naval surgeon on the Corvette Rhone, bound for the South Seas. For three years, he held this position at sea, moving from one military ship to another, from the West Indies to the eastern Mediterranean. In 1827, at Navarino, he witnessed the destruction of the Turkish fleet by a coalition of France, England and the United States. In 1828, in the West Indies, he was severely affected by yellow fever, but managed to get better, thanks to the care of a woman of color who became his lover. Returning to Paris, he turned to the profession of painter and became the pupil of Gudin, the marine painter. Eugene was unsuccessful as a painter, as he had been as a doctor and sailor, but he had lived a lot, learned a lot in this three-year stint. And these failures prepared his literary career; he now had the source material for his maritime novels. His first texts appeared in two small newspapers - The Novelty and The Kaleidoscope; then, in 1830 appeared his first novel, Kernok le Pirate, published as a three-part serial in the magazine La Mode. It was a seafaring novel inspired by the stories of James Fenimore Cooper and Daniel Defoe; then followed El Gitano (1830), Plik and Plok (1831), Atar-Gull (1831), and La Salamandre (1832). In these works, charged with black romanticism, satanic characters, and shipwrecks, Eugene Sue excelled in bringing to light the superficiality of social judgment, a church whose language and principles had lost their meaning, and fate which doesn't know good from evil. He had read and admired the pages in which Cooper depicted the ferocious manners of the savages, their picturesque, poetic language, the thousand ruses by which they fled or pursued their enemies. Eugene put under the eyes of the reader some episodes of the life of other barbarians, outcasts of civilization; however his barbarians were depicted as living in our midst. We could elbow them, venture into the dens where they lived, where they gathered to concoct murder, theft; and even share their spoils. Eugene Sue became as popular as Alexandre Dumas, one of the most famous writers of his time, at the publication of The Wandering Jew and The Mysteries of Paris; though often cited these two masterpieces are - due to their length? - seldom actually read nowadays. So, MS Books Publishing proudly brings you the short novel by Eugene Sue that holds a peculiar place in the history of popular culture. Kernok the Pirate is an adventure novel with several action scenes, often very deadly; however, this violence is not neutral and leads to real dramatic moments, mostly marked by black humor. The comical is on every page, either by the irony of narration or the truculence of characters and situations; all scenes are treated in an ironic way without ever sinking into parody.