My Body and I — Rene Crevel

In My Body and I (1925), René Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being, exploring the tension between body and spirit. Crevel's meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator's Romantic mind moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. Admired greatly by André Breton and Ezra Pound, Crevel might be thought of as a surrealist Proust.

Robert Bononno's translations include Henri Raczymow's Swan's Way and Herve Guibert's Ghost Image.