Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1954868 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 132 pages

From Booklist
Desnos (1900-45), one of the earliest and best French surrealists, attempted to subvert normal ideas of order by using tarot cards, trances, and hallucinogenic mushrooms as aids to composition. His poetry has often been translated, but this novel is here published in English for the first time. It is a masterpiece of automatic writing--a technique in which the author writes while in a trance. Desnos could achieve this state and write out his attendant dreams without hypnosis. So the book--brilliant, funny, deeply disturbing, more than a little sick--resembles the dream that wakes you up with its vehemence. It is nearly impossible to summarize. Desnos treats the characters like musical themes. The action takes place in a tide of imagination in which characters appear, vanish, and then reappear according to dream logic. Many sections of the work were at first censored because of their violent, dark eroticism; this translation is unexpurgated and contains some fairly strong stuff. The book is, however, significant in world literature both for its intrinsic value and as an example of very early surrealism. John Shreffler

Customer Reviews

A BOOK! FAR TOO LONG UNTRANSLATED! WHY NOT READ IT?
liberty or love! smells like boiling tunafish and sounds like drowning puppy dogs and its eyes look like theyve spent the night striking matches on themselves and its gaze dunks everything it sees in mollasses. how could one of the greatest surrealist texts go almost 70 years before being translated into english? this book is better than bretons two novels and better than soupalts last night of paris. so there. the one problem i had with this book, a book that throws out the constricting conventions of typical literature, was that the glue that sticks all the bizarre scenes together is the worst stalest convention of them all, the pursuit of the muse in the form of an ellusive woman. blahhh. easy to look past though. especially when there are such unforgetably shocking passages as The Sperm Drinkers Club.