Book Description
In My Body and I (Mon Corps et Moi, 1925), René Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being. Exploring the tension between body and spirit, Crevel’s meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry, truth, and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator’s Romantic mind moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. A Surrealist Proust.
Without René Crevel we would have lost one of the most beautiful pillars of surrealism.
— André Breton
Crevel remains one of the most readable Surrealists...His liquid language tumbles along, powered by his strong descriptions, by his love of Freudian wordplay—rarely is a cigar just a cigar.
— Publishers Weekly
The works that Crevel left us indicate that he was one of the most original, gifted French novelists of the century.
— San Francisco Bay Guardian
Crevel actually wrote only a single sentence: the long sentence of a feverish monologue from the pen of a Proust who dipped his biscuit laced with LSD into his tea, instead of the unctuous madeleine.
— Angelo Rinaldi, L'Express
This is an astonishing capture of Crevel's most memorable text: funny, sad, spilling over, and unputtable down.
— Mary Ann Caws
He will be read more and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the ‘great names’ that preceded him.
— Ezra Pound
