Libro tanto affascinante quanto difficile e inestricabile, soprattutto se non si padroneggia il francese. E tuttavia potente nell'incastro di parole e immagini e - soprattutto - memorabile nelle sue più note dichiarazioni di intenti sull'opera d'arte. ( )

"Mad Love"?! He shd see a history of my life. ( )

While I admire the aesthetic of the French prose poem, I am not sure that it really works all that well in this instance. The point of comparison that Breton clearly wants to make, stylistically, is with Lautréamont's magnificent Les Chants de Maldoror, but his purpose is so completely at odds with that book that the attempt, for me, was ultimately unsuccessful.

You see, Breton wants to make an aesthetic statement, a kind of poetic manifesto as to what beauty and love would be in the context of surrealism. Being a surrealist, he can't just write some essay or manifesto (although he does do that in [b:Manifestoes of Surrealism|115164|Manifestoes of Surrealism|André Breton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472344999s/115164.jpg|110898]), he has to self-reflexively put into practice the artistic principles that underlie his philosophy.

I'm rather sympathetic to the surrealist cause, but I'm yet to be convinced entirely by Breton. He seems a little bit too much like a politician to me, someone who comes across as leveraging his position for fame and power and reputation. That doesn't make what he has to say in Mad Love wrong, exactly, but it does make me suspicious of its ulterior motives.

What it comes down to is this: Breton is at his best when he speaks directly and simply. The book's most memorable lines - its concluding sentence, for instance, which everyone quotes, or some of his more lucid statements in the beginning about the nature of compulsive beauty - are how he should have written the whole book. The rambling parts about strolling through Paris with Giacometti or wandering through Tenerife are indeed poetic and, if you are in the right mood, lovely and lyrical, but my current mood is that I want meat, content, substance into which I can sink my teeth. From that perspective, Mad Love was a bone that simply did not contain enough meat to satisfy me. ( )

André Breton was one of the first Surrealists and wrote many of the manifestos, declarations and exegetical essays for that literary and artistic movement. Reading Breton the theoretician, one comes to see that Surrealism as it was originally conceived bears only the slightest resemblance to the way most people today use the term. Surrealism is more a way of experiencing the world, and—as with psilocybin, or quantum field theory—once it’s absorbed by your cognitive apparatus, it’s part of your intuition forever.

Mad Love is somewhere between an extended essay and a prose poem that both illustrates and explains Breton’s preoccupations—“the dominion of the senses,” celebration of the spontaneous and the unforeseeable, the paradoxical cultivation of “chance.” The Surrealist—in art, love, and nature—favors spontaneous creativity over willed perfection, excavation of the accidental over the “imperious concern for equilibrium.” A fundamental tenet of Surrealism is that one can transform the world by transforming one’s perception of the world. Enlightenment converges on a shadowy point, blurring the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The Surrealist prefers the staging of the ritual to the ritual itself, not the rare bird but the small red feather in the headdress of a Hawaiian chieftain.

How can one ever after conjure that initial state of mind aroused by the odd poetic moment of convulsive beauty? If that question makes sense to you, then reading Mad Love will be its own reward. ( )

One star belongs to translator Mary Ann Caws, who perfectly captures Breton's special quality of being able to string a wreath of images so that each individual element remains quite clear while ultimately everything blurs. A bit of advice for reading Breton: don't stop and linger over any particular formulation, trying to puzzle out a bit of meaning that isn't immediately clear. There is no meaning worth the word in Breton. There is only sequence and you must not break the sequence. If you do, you will likely not experience the disorientation that this surrealist master is able to induce. The "ideas" only work insofar as they are juxtaposed against those immedately preceding or succeeding them. Of course, if you don't cotton to being disoriented, by all means stop frequently and ask yourself, "What the heck is that supposed to mean?" I'm not convinced that the photographs (by among others Brassai and Man Ray) contribute all that much, especially when they are as poorly reproduced as they are here. ( )