This writer, of the end of 19th century is read rather little because of the very great complexity of his works. With the first access, his books content stories or poetry. But makes some in its works Locus Solus, The star with the face, Impressions of Africa... construction is very rigorous:

R. Roussel wrote : " I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two found sentences, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus ".

The process in New Impressions of Africa is somewhat different and extremely complicated. It took 7 years to write the 40 pages of the book with which associated 59 rather mysterious drawings compared to the text, compared to their very particular layout in the book ! R. Roussel even imagined a machine for reading his book. The principal difficulty of reading is the overlap of brackets on several levels, with footnotes (cf extracts hereafter)

Obviously, nothing can be explained simply : both texts and drawings were the subject of very many comments, so much the mystery is remaining.