From Publishers Weekly
Breton, father of the surrealist movement, saw that the basic problem of making a living could interfere with love as well as poetry. Love, for the French poet, had to be transformed into a powerful emotion that put the lover in touch with the marvelous. The focus of this transformation, in his own case, was artist Jacqueline Lamba, with whom he lived in New York, Mexico and Marseilles. L'Amour fou (1937) is convoluted and stilted when it sets forth his surrealist philosophy of "mad love," romantic and sometimes incandescently lyrical when it presents autobiographical reminiscences. Included is a moving letter Breton wrote to his daughter ("I want you to be madly loved"). This first English-language translation of the surrealist text is also the first volume in the French Modernist Library.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In this definitional essay of 1936, Breton, then 40, indulged in another explicit, autobiographical illustration of Surrealism. Despite his title, he does not sacramentalize sex; rather, he evokes special moments in his life since Nadja (1928), epiphanies intensified by his receptive search for instructive, fortuitous juxtapositions. He concludes with a letter to his eight-month-old daughter, whose appealing infancy stimulates his most tender and vehement thoughts on humankind. Translator Caws provides a masterly introduction and annotation, and the original visuals are nicely reproduced: six photographs by Man Ray, three by Brasai, and one each by Cartier-Bression, Dora Maer, and Rogi Andre. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Comparative Literature Dept., SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
