"The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely." With that remark, the gentleman adventurer Andre Marcueil sets into motion an outrageous plot of scientific experiments and technological heroism focused on author Alfred Jarry's trinity of obsessions: sex, alcohol, and bicycles. Like a mock Jules Verne, Jarry describes the manner in which the "Supermale" ultimately proves his claim; after 82 times with a woman, attending doctors hook him up to a machine instead, with whom he merges in the book's--and the Supermale's--final climax. This 1902 novel is, together with Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1898), one of the pillars of Pataphysics, Jarry's "science of imaginary solutions." Translated from French by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright.
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