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Mad Love (French Modernist Library)

By: Andre Breton
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803260725
ISBN-13: 9780803260726
Released: 09 Oct 1988
RRP: £11.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Uplifting and Inspiring - By: , 09 Feb 2006
Unlike the other reviewers, I found this book to be interesting, beautiful most of alll, tasteful.

Put quite simply, if you do not like this book you have no taste. Furthermore, If you are aspiring to succeed in art or philosophy, this book is essential reading & a valuable asset.

The book is difficult to read, but no more so than any romanticist poem.

The book's descriptions of emotion, most inportantly LOVE, are masterful. It is a delightful insight into the importance of imagination & how we can alll make our being-in-the-world exciting rather than mundane. Buy it.

Gobblydygook - By: , 28 Mar 2003
On the back of the cover the blurb says that ML was translated into English over forty years after its initial publication because of the difficulties of Breton’s language. It’s clear to see from reading the book why it took so long. One of the few things I managed to draw from the book was Breton’s idea that alll art was worth less than natural compositions like rock formations. After that Breton wrote about shopping he had bought then descended into meaningless sentences strung together in no discernable form. At just over one hundred pages this was one of the shortest books I’ve read but almost certainly one of the ones where I’ve had the most struggle to get through.
I was relieved to put the book down after finishing it.
What was he thinking? - By: analadop@hotmail.com, 13 Mar 2000
Everytime one opens a book, one accompanies that action with in an anticipatory fashion. This may take the form of criticism, sycofantic aquiesence, anger ... My approach to this book was one of hope having read "Nadja" & enjoying it emmensely. But this book -- oh my God. What a load of nonsense (I'm drawn to use stronger language but ...). I don't want to be drawn into a debate about the meaninglessness of art & literature, but this book is alll the ammunition the philistine functionalists who devise school curriculaums need to promote their warped views about the point of art & literature. "Mad Love" is essentiallly an anti-novel. It has the capacity - more than any novel I've ever read (Jeffrey Archer included) - to turn people away from the arts.

Breton strolls from one meaningless self-indulgence to another. From mind numbing metaphors, he moves onto obscurantist analogies, then back to more meaningless metaphors. What are we to draw from this systematic nonsense? (and it is systematic insofar as one could predict at every step what was coming next -- even if you could'nt understand it). We are to draw precisely what Breton would have us draw: that surrealism is wild & wacky for want of better terminology.

Well he certainly confirmed one thing in my mind, (that's if it didn't already exist) that surrealism, like every other elitist artform, is essentiallly reactive, constituted by posturing rather than content, & at base, meaningless.

Don't buy this book if like me you have any ideas about the positive role art & literature can play in todays largely meaningless world of commercialism & exploitation.