Mad Love

Mad Love is a bizarre, beautiful book. It is a novel, an autobiography, a manifesto–a highly unusual hybrid or, better yet, a miracle of rare device…[Breton] has seduced me. I have tried to make sense, using words, of his longings. I am in love with this book, but like Breton, I cannot explain my deep, irrational responses.–Review of Contemporary Fiction. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. I have wanted to show above all what precautions and what ruses desire takes, in search of its object and evading it. –Andr Breton Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now. There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine, writes Andr Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. Mad Love is dedicated to defying the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust.
Celebrating breton’s own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things. Translator Caws provides a masterly introduction and annotation, wrote the reviewer for the Library Journal. Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is the author or translator of more than twenty books.