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Hilarious and masterfully well written, bitingly funny
For anyone interested in surrealism this book is a must. Aragon is harsh and yet decisive in his uncompromising judgment of what is obsolete and what is not with respect to the surrealist revolution, and his denunciation of 'automatic writing' as poetry is right on the mark. He is so obnoxious and unsparing in his criticism of everyone and everything that the reader immediately realizes he was mistaken in joining the Communist Party and leaving the surrealist movement:he was made for a group that espoused absolute rebellion against everyone and everything conventional, and it was where he belonged. He distinguishes real poets from those he so gently refers to as, "any dog on the street who, like an inexhaustible diarrhea, ceaselessly copies down his insignificant scribblings and dares to compare it with true poetry". Eheheehehe! A must ... Read more

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Jean Cassou wrote the thirty-three sonnets which Aragon admired so much and which form the first part of this collection in a Vichy prison between December 1941 and February 1942, in the dark, half a sonnet per night, committed to memory and only written down when a few days before his provisional release he was allowed some books, a pencil and some sheets of paper. Through his fine and thoughtful translation of these sonnets and a selection of Cassou's later poems, Timothy Ades gives us the opportunity of discovering an unfamiliar - and now historical - poetic voice. ... Read more