Arcanum 17

by André Breton

Andr? Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gasp? Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perc? Rock-its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty-as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940650029
• ISBN13: 9780940650022
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Green Integer
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Love evolves as it endures...

Here is Breton exploring landscapes that remind him of where he is in relation to humanity and all that is dear to him. He has left a 'failed' relationship behind in Paris, and begins a final chapter in 'Surrealist Imagery' with a new found love in Canada. The underlying heartbeat of this book is the will to endure the ectstatic highs and lows that create the emotion-memories and presence of love. There is a treasure in this book, perhaps even a gift; no one word can explain the gift--which is much like a powerful monolith the size of a needle's eye. To be more precise though, I recognized a sort of strategy in this book: Love is infinite; it does not end with the loss of a beloved; through the mind, one can relate to the particle-images of one's memory and consistantly love people who were loved in the past (who have passed beyond presence), extending and introducing a past that was both beautiful and disastrous to a presence that becomes more vivid, more intricate, more loving with each connection made to the memories of persons who shared time and created space like children on a familiar playground.