Are You All Crazy?

The first English translation of this wild, rambling 1929 novel from French surrealist Crevel (1900–1935) takes readers through a series of rapid-fire phantasmagoric visions: a living dead woman keeps both a bull and a 100-pound rat in her apartment; a fortune teller provides bizarre, rhubarb-based solutions to a couple’s marital troubles; a towering sanitarium stretches toward the heavens; and a strange doctor creates new faces for his patients, to name just a few. Translator Boswell does an effective job handling Crevel’s seething, sexually fraught imagery (“The ultimate slut anachronistically proud of the slimy and over-elaborate castle crowning her head, goddess of mayonnaise hiding nothing of what she knows of cosmogony, politics, local adulteries, whilst the oil of her sauce falls drop by drop into a bowl, is not the only one who inspires the City.“), and there’s a palpable horror as the narrator’s inner life collides with the sharp edges of the world he inhabits. Readers unfamiliar with Dadaist fiction will likely find this inaccessible, with little plot to speak of and imagery that deliberately obfuscates meaning. Fans of surreal early horror, however, will be pleased to discover this hidden gem. (Apr.)