My Body and I - Rene Crevel

My Body and I by René Crevel, translated by Robert Bononno / ISBN 9780974968094 / small paperback with flaps from Archipelago

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"This is an astonishing capture of Crevel’s most memorable text: funny, sad, spilling over, and impossible to put down." —Mary Ann Caws

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 and sensations to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. A Surrealist Proust.

René Crevel (1900–1935) was deeply involved with the Surrealist movement. Novelist, poet, and essayist, Crevel was an explorer of the psyche. My Body and I allows us to enter the writer’s inner landscape that led to his suicide at the age of 35. Crevel’s English publications include Babylon (North Point Press, 1985), Putting My Foot in It (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), and Difficult Death (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).