Mad Love

Synopsis

Mad Love (French: L'Amour fou) is an autobiographical prose work by the French writer and Surrealist theorist André Breton, composed between 1934 and 1936 and first published by Gallimard in February 1937. Structured in seven chapters, it combines autobiographical narrative, theoretical reflection, lyrical prose, accounts of dreams and coincidences, photography, found objects, and travel writing. Its principal subjects are love, desire, beauty, the marvellous, and Breton's concept of "objective chance", through which apparently fortuitous events can appear to correspond to otherwise unexpressed desires. The book's central autobiographical episodes include Breton's 1934 meeting with the artist Jacqueline Lamba, their subsequent nocturnal walk through Paris, a journey with Lamba and Benjamin Péret to Tenerife in 1935, and a later crisis in the couple's relationship during a stay in Brittany. It concludes with an address to Breton and Lamba's daughter Aube, born in December 1935. Mad Love is closely related to Breton's Nadja (1928) and Communicating Vessels (French: Les Vases communicants, 1932). Rather than constituting a trilogy planned from the outset, the three books were subsequently treated by Breton as a related sequence of autobiographical and theoretical works concerned with dreams, encounters, desire, and objective chance. In a letter to Jean Paulhan of 2 December 1939, Breton expressed the wish to bring the three works together under a single cover. The first English translation, by Mary Ann Caws, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987 under the title Mad Love.

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Book

Release date

January 1, 1937

Created by

André Breton

Countries

France