Customer Reviews

Arcanum 17 (Green Integer)

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Here is Breton exploring landscapes that remind him of where he is in relation to humanity and all that is dear to him. He has left a 'failed' relationship behind in Paris, and begins a final chapter in 'Surrealist Imagery' with a new found love in Canada. The underlying heartbeat of this book is the will to endure the ectstatic highs and lows that create the emotion-memories and presence of love. There is a treasure in this book, perhaps even a gift; no one word can explain the gift--which is much like a powerful monolith the size of a needle's eye. To be more precise though, I recognized a sort of strategy in this book: Love is infinite; it does not end with the loss of a beloved; through the mind, one can relate to the particle-images of one's memory and consistantly love people who were loved in the past (who have passed beyond presence), extending and introducing a past that was both beautiful and disastrous to a presence that becomes more vivid, more intricate, more loving with each connection made to the memories of persons who shared time and created space like children on a familiar playground.

Neither wholly poem or narrative or argument, this slight volume sits in your hand and is an aesthetic beauty. The language is a pleasure, and we should thank both Breton and his translator for this work. It is part dream, part reality as the rock crumbles and we face our own impermanence. It is not Nadja, but something different.

My thought while I read was this: "Reading for a glint in the darkness, you find something beautiful, but even with it in your hands, you cannot tell anyone what it is or not as a deficit of your descriptive powers but because there is nothing you can describe it with." A thing of fleeting and ephemeral beauty you have to hold.