novel, illus Max Ernst, tr w/ afterword Kay Boyle

Babylon

CREVEL, René

Literature & Fiction

Interlink Publishing+group Inc

Difficult Death (English and French Edition)

North Point Pr

Mon corps et moi (French Edition)

Genre Fiction

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the Marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters ands slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel’s 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the “Prince of Journalists.” This bizarre family―the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback―is matched by Crevel’s bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels―literary, semantic, psychological, ideological―until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel’s characters appear in a dirty movie entitled “The Geography Lesson,” a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound’s well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who knew Crevel in the 1930s. (Mr. Roditi died in May of 1992 while this book was in production.)

Putting My Foot in It

World Literature

Dalkey Archive Press

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family - the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback - is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels - literary, semantic, psychological, ideological - until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel'scharacters appear in a dirty movie entitled The Geography Lesson, a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound's well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who

Contemporary

René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist who suffered from tuberculosis, was one of the most important surrealist authors, a true genius, and possibly the best writer of surrealist fiction, and no other of his works of fiction is more surreal than Are You All Crazy?-originally published in 1929 and here presented for the first time in English in a superb translation by Sue Boswell. In this feverish, full-speed-ahead novel of out-and-out madness, we meet a redhead who gives birth to a blue child, hear the naughty song of the pigtail-pullers, visit the Sexual Institute of Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer, attend an eonism séance, and witness a fifty-kilo rat disembowelling a fakir. Are You All crazy? is a subversive masterpiece and a work of deep psychological interest, which, although puzzling in the utmost in its excesses of satirical bravado, certainly must be acknowledged to be one of the great European novels.

Are You All Crazy?

Classics

Snuggly Books

La Mort difficile

PAUVERT

Babylone

LA MORT DIFFICILE

OMBRES

Klee

Gallimard]

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