Babylon

by René Crevel

novel, illus Max Ernst, tr w/ afterword Kay Boyle

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, Novels, 20th Century, Surreal, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself.

Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me").

In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.
-from wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boredom, the stepson of pride: the repetition of facts and gestures, the collection of untruths by which those called "grown-ups" live, these one childhood had sworn never to accept.
I have to pretend to be sorry about romantic expectations hung on one person, as if they were the moon and stars. Maybe I don't do it that well but it continues to happen. Someone would have to hang around with a person they didn't want to share the only life (probably) they'll ever get. The rest of it, loneliness and a wistfulness to be seen. Turn the hands and you're the you you could believe in. All of that stuff. I don't get the life unexamined if you can go, "Well, I'm married so that's all good". I felt for the mother who is left by her husband and her beautiful cousin. Her daughter enacts their moon and the sun with the small world at her fingertips. They have bitterness for breakfast and "Told you so" for second breakfast. Her small head goes to bed pushed down by a life that won't go on, obsessed with Cynthia. She's obsessed by Cynthia as the winner. I couldn't help feeling for the loser, not knowing how to want for herself. I can see her becoming one of the suspected poplar trees, scenery. I lived the little girl's life, though. My earliest memory was celebrating freedom from my father but many more after were the paths of the end. Marriage, a stamp of approval from a penis, I don't know. I don't get it. I can think "That's not fair!" for the grandfather. His wife, Amie once more. She takes her daughter's new man. If people were for the taking, if they are I don't see them. I would rather be a beast somewhere, my eyes running over mysterious fields somewhere else. I go cow-eyed more than ever when someone blames the person sitting next to them because their dreams didn't come true. Such bullshit. Princes, queens, wild dreams of owls become fish. She has an awakening and maybe it was the glamorous Cynthia with her narcotic sight. A young maid is related to Russian bears stalking jet planes. Drinking kerosene and run away. Her gardener rules with fists of ham. She murders him and they, the man, will kill her. The little girl still grows up under glass of fish, bright in spots. I don't know if it is the sex that lights their life. I'm not seeing any ends there (only the beginnings). The mother is married off to the tiny Mac-Louf. Run away to Africa where no one is listening to your endings. She must have been a poplar tree to them too because does anyone remember there was a child. Mac-Louf does some do-gooding and the apartment gets a charity maid. The young negroe misses the hands on her tits, the groaning in grasses. I can't get too excited either way. I get a bad faraway feeling thinking about what could happen to those very young girls, later on. If they had wanted to, if anyone asked. I doubt that the stonings of the little girls one reads about today would have happened if there weren't outsider Mac-Loufs about in the first place to talk too much about what someone else was doing. It's like some vast ocean somewhere, I'm not invited (I don't want to open the door again to ponder if I felt so bad for the abandoned wife because I'm also not pretty, so also not going to see where the Cynthias lie in exotic sheets of some fleshy bliss blissful owing to you don't have to think about it). The satellites pick up the heat life when there's a howling, an in time. I don't care if the maid lived happily ever after with her man with the hands. The grandma aging out of herself again. The fevered negress taken for a prostitute. Cynthia's drug dealer with the suit case is much less than her stealing three drops of the red-heads perfume to pretend to be her. I loved their outside. I get the feeling Crevel felt a lot like I did when it's just a bit of silence in the after. I don't know if the little girl ever lives outside the glass. I have a feeling she ran out of air to breathe inside their rooms just by waiting for the Cynthias to suggest.... something. I don't know. I never had an idea of what else was supposed to happen when beautiful people ran away for something other than what they know.

In a red and gray city, you will have a colorless room with silver walls, its windows open to the clouds, whose sister you are. It is in the wide open sky that one must seek the gestures of your fingers, the shadow of your face.

Max Ernst contributed nineteen photograms. The black on black showing up outlines in an x-ray. A humanoid is marionetted on itself, a crown dehaloed is above. A fence like a most paranoid vertical blind with a sun rising behind. Cynthia's face made up. Birds of a feather to fate. I liked that they feel like they could be made again out of your own room and paths.

I'm suspicious of the translator, Kay Boyle. I could be a jerk. There's a fuss in my North Point Press copy about the ages worked on it. I have this image of Crevel as like me. The letting go is the drive and the pull, you know? You write to live at least a little further than the unthought thoughts. Also, she's got an autobiography about her and some other dude called "Being geniuses together". I am going to read one of her novels in case I'm a jerk. I never know how to explain the "vibe" of a good or bad translation. It's all bullshit since my language grasp is nothing to write about. But I wonder if the feeling I get that the removal is in a foreign listener is from translations. Not all the time just in an awkward turn.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schitterende surrealistische roman uit 1927, van een van de gangmakers van het genre. Kan zo staan naast NADJA en DE BOER VAN PARIJS. De stijl is poëtisch, het verhaal bij momenten hilarisch, voortdurend de grens tussen droom en werkelijkheid bespelend. Bij Vleugels kwam een tijd terug een selectie gedichten van Crevel uit, deze geweldige roman verdient evenzeer een heruitgave. Ik las de zeer geslaagde vertaling van Nele Ysebaert uit 1998, in de knappe Perdu-reeks Atopieën. Die kan eigenlijk zo overgenomen worden. Het is maar een idee.

[Quinn Slobodian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crevel went on morphine for tuberculosis in 1926 and wrote Babylon in the next year as the world bulged and his empathy overflowed over all frowned-at lovers, addicts, voluptuaries and "hoodlums of the city of flesh who did not make eyes, but mouths." Being rejected for his homosexuality even among Breton's band of Surrealists left Crevel with a desperate solidarity with outsiders but his heroine is the girl in a straw crown who remains undissolved, "belonging neither to heaven nor earth but serving nonetheless as hinge to one and to the other." Turning heliotropic to the dull heat of all the suns and stars around her, his love for her lasts longer because of the unconsummated length of her longing. The dissolute's greatest admiration, it seems, is for the one that trembles forever at the edge of dissolution.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dit is een zeer merkwaardige roman waarin een naamloos meisje (consequent aangeduid met 'het kind') haar bekrompen volwassen familieleden één voor één ziet ontsporen tot een leven van seks en drugs. Maar belangrijker dan dit satirische verhaal is Crevels taal: in de verdeling tussen roman en poëzie zit 'Babylon' nog maar nèt aan de romankant: Crevels schrijfstijl is erg barok, poëtisch, zinnelijk, beeldenrijk en evocatief, en vaak leest het boek als één lang prozagedicht. Bovendien richt Crevel zich vaak tot zijn personages, wat tot ode-achtige passages leidt. Het boek is zwanger van erotiek en verdovende middelen, maar vooral van Crevels volstrekt unieke stijl. De enige smet op Crevels wonderlijke roman zijn de inmiddels volstrekt achterhaalde en clichématige 'woeste en bandeloze negers' die worden opgevoerd.

[Aldana · Rating 5 out of 5]

De los mejores libros que leí en la vida.
Gracioso, surrealista, crítico, prosa hermosa.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first time reading Crevel. I may have gotten a little over-hyped by the blurbs on the cover, which may have led me to hope for too much from the poor book. All in all, I have to say I found it kinda too heavy on the -realism and a bit weak in the Surr- category for my taste. Granted the 1920s were another time--hey, a whole century ago--I can only read this novel now through my own postmodern condition, appreciating what remains of a glorious moment of exploration and transition in Occidental literature, but also a tad disappointed in the novel's not transcending so many tired conventions of the bourgeois novel.

First of all, I very much liked Crevel's prose, as least as much of it as I got from Kay Boyle's translation. The beauty of the descriptions, metaphors and similes, the frequent digressions into straight-up prose reverie were beautiful and the best thing about the novel imho. Also, for a novel that is, I think, trying to use sex, sexual passion, and sensual abandon as strategies against bourgeois complacency and bland, soul-assassinating Christian moral conformity, the text was a whole lot less sexist than such texts tend to be. Perhaps this is partially due to Crevel's bisexuality, or perhaps he's just a man who respected women before it became hip to do so, or maybe it's only accidental. Still, it's a fairy tale world he creates in which sex breaks social taboos but is never realistically portrayed nor its real guts examined. (Let's face it, as much as we love love, the physical details of sex are often disconcerting, troubling, filled with personal predilections and moral judgements, often soothing and lovely but also frequently verging on violence and ugliness, so I have to say that here it's pretty much whitewashed, even if I wholly agree that sensual abandon beats an uptight and awkward family thanksgiving dinner every time.)

The novel isn't too long but it began to feel long because its lovely digressions into reverie were just that, digressions, and the ostensible realistic plot wasn't very satisfying as such since the characters were cardboard and the plot mundane. Obviously these things were meant to be so, but there wasn't enough linguistic or literary transcendence to counteract the vague adherence to the tired literary conventions of a realistic family drama or the new poetic approach to prose and storytelling. The latter never gave me enough to make up for the lack of effort and acumen of the former.

Also, it's difficult and maybe unfair to judge a text for what it doesn't do, but this novel begins in the mind of the youngest character in the family and then goes further and further away from her and her POV as it goes on until she's an indifferent observer at the end equated with the city surrounding the characters. In retrospect, this is a lovely and interesting image, but in practice--perhaps because of the realist tradition the novel is at least partially attacking--her vanishing is disappointing. Since we begin with her POV, we readers I think identified with her and then it's like the novel abandons us both as it meanders on to nothing very much more interesting than where it began.

Also the introduction of the African governess and the subsequent praise of "native" passion felt rather in the orientalist vein. I know Crevel meant well, and I'm sure Occidental stuffiness could learn a lot from many other less technological cultures' sexual freedoms, but, well, he just couldn't get far enough outside of Occidental rhetoric here to convince me.

I have another Crevel on the shelf. I'm still interested enough to try it, but maybe not for a while.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, bizarre and profound story of debauchery, jealousy and unleashed sexuality. A young girl witnesses the affairs of her parents, grandmother, and servants. Murder, obsession and thievery. The adventure is heralded by the flame haired Cynthia, devourer of the earth and sky.

Crevel writes in a labyrinthine and shimmering miasma of the absurdity of humanity, sexuality and existence. Highly recommended.

[Prosey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last section of Babylon is incredible as well as the afterword!

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, exuberant prose. Quite humorous. Crevel was associated with the surrealists and his writing reads similarly; verbose, hypercharged. But other than a few dreams early on Babylon isn't really surreal, it focuses on real action, has a linear plot. Crevel makes a young girl his central character early on which suits the narrative well and explains some of the unique fixations. The plot itself, revolving around a single family, is absurd. The mother has her man stolen by two different family members. But it's in the lyrical passages in between dialog where the writing is just utterly incredible. Crevel seems to critique rationale, hypocritical France with sensual, honest Africa but the comparison is paternalizing to Africans, who are caricatures. The good intent doesn't overcome the depiction. These early twentieth century French authors (e.g. Raymond Roussel) often fetishized Africa while Black men in French colonies (Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire) were writing works of similar ambition that also seriously grappled with colonialism. Anyways, that's an aside, and I still love the book for its gorgeous descriptions.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

It doesn't have the lyricism I love about Aragon's PARIS PEASANT or Breton's NADJA, but the Surrealist Movement produced so few novels that I'll take what I can get.

[Jade Aslain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crevel saved the best for last. This book just gets better and better as it proceeds. One of the best surrealist novels I have ever read.

[lisa_emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason I felt meh about this work- I usually like these flights of fancy, but not this one so much

[Brian]

Babylon, a Surrealist novel that challenges the structure of the novel itself and social values through a syntax of non-linearity. The ocean, full of multicolored and exotic fish, is Crevel’s prose: loaded with metaphor and poetic digression. The characters have an electrical current of hidden desires, safeguarded emotions, and immured values that transpire within the chaos of a repressed inner life. One metaphor that is constant within Crevel’s writings is the “geography of the body.” Examining the spatial variants of eroticism, desire, sovereignty on a metaphoric image of “the body,” whether it is a social (values) or corporeal (the individual) body, is the starting point in Crevel’s investigation of a more fuller experience of the human condition. Babylon attacks the bourgeoisie values of a jaded middle-class society in order to liberate man from Western rationality and simultaneously aiming to release his own flesh from social restrictions.

[Kit · Rating 2 out of 5]

4 stars for the first half, which follows the effects of a dysfunctional rich family on a young girl's fantasy life. 0 stars for the second half with its sensational/erotic reliance on racist tropes.

[Carah Naseem]

FAIL dropped this in radio city music hall. will have to read at a later date.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book began perfectly, but got lost somewhere in the middle.

[Priya · Rating 1 out of 5]

self indulgent piece of crap

[[ashes] · Rating 3 out of 5]

dutch version

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crevel's brutal novel of a bourgeois family's unraveling amid domestic revolt, suppressed motherly lust, paternalistic impotence and a little girls' coming of age. With illustrations by Max Ernst.

[Demetrios Dolios · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early transgression literature if u ask me