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Babylon

René Crevel

Translated from the French with an Afterword by Kay Boyle
Preface by Anna Balakian
Illustrations by Max Ernst

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Digital Only

Price: U.S. $5.95
Series No.: SMC 148
ISBN: 9781557131966, Pages: 170
French Literature, Fiction

A Sun & Moon title.

* * *

Rene Crevel, essayist and novelist but essentially poet in everything he wrote, began as a student of 18th-century rationalism. He was engaged in writing a treatise on Denis Diderot when he encountered the surrealists and, joining this group of iconoclasts, came to believe that Reason had betrayed the mind. While the surrealists talked of rebellion, Crevel embodied rebellion. Fellow surrealist Philippe Soupault said of him: "He was born a rebel the way others are born with blue eyes." And when in 1935 the Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, meeting in Paris under strong Stalinist leadership, impeded the liberty of speech of the surrealists, Crevel chose self-immolation as his ultimate surrealist act of protest.

Crevel's substantial work of some 10 volumes became lost to readers of his own generation and only reemerged in print in France some 40 years after his death. It is, therefore, as much out of context today as was Arthur Rimbaud's famous message contained in a letter written in 1871 but not made public until 1912: that poetry is a search for knowledge and not mere self-expression.

In Babylon, a landmark of Surrealist literature, Crevel explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations.

A free-spirited young girl witnesses her father elope with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new fiancé, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational Experience.

Perhaps Crevel's most evocative and moving work, Babylon is a fiction of stylistic elegance and psychological depth that probes the interplay between the rational and the subconscious.


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