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Putting My Foot in It
Translated with an Afterword and Notes by Thomas Buckley
Foreword by Ezra Pound
Introduction by Edouard Roditi
Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the Marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters ands slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of "The Romance of the Rose."
Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family--the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback--is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels--literary, semantic, psychological, ideological--until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel's characters appear in a dirty movie entitled "The Geography Lesson," a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars.
This edition also reprints Ezra Pound's well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who knew Crevel in the 1930s. (Mr. Roditi died in May of 1992 while this book was in production.)
"Crevel was born rebellious the way others are born with blue eyes."--Philippe Soupault
"Crevel, author of half a dozen works to be precise, actually wrote only a single sentence: the long sentence of a feverish monologue from the pen of a Proust who dipped his biscuit laced with LSD into his tea, instead of the unctuous madeleine."--Angelo Rinaldi, L'Express
"He will be read more and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the 'great names' that preceded him."--Ezra Pound
"He struggled all his life, without degrading himself in the coils of the struggle, struggled against everything: against his germs, against his family heritage, against injustice, against dishonesty which he loathed, against the task that others wanted to get him to do near the end of his life under the pretext of drawing him into I don't know what stupid obedience."--Rene Char
"Putting My Foot in It. Verbal excess? But how can one fill the gaps in reality without having recourse to excessive words? Crevel's work, a desperate confrontation between man and his condition, is a frantic leveling of life and language. Proust's work (with which Crevel is infused) attempts to be an extra-temporal compensation for all past, present, and future deficiencies. Crevel, on the contrary, flees time or runs ahead of it. . . . If you don't find Crevel's fever contagious, then you are definitely vaccinated against rebellion. So close this book: exaltation is tiring and you know how to float on your back, letting time carry you along. What's the use of trying to cut through the waves to go out to sea, since in any event, odds are that the sea will bring your drowned body back to the beach, so close and so comfortable, from which you never should have wandered."--Claude Courtot, Rene Crevel (1969)
"[French critics] refused to forgive Crevel for having put his foot in the mouth of the opportunism of the French Third Republic society, which he suspected of preparing the way for a French fascism."--Michel Carassou, Rene Crevel
"A scathing political and social satire about a post-World War I Europe increasingly darkened by Hitlerian shadows. . . . In a radical departure from the standard French-fiction fare of his day, Crevel brilliantly renews the force and the farce of Petronius' "Satryicon." Indeed this ribald, acerbic, at times, uproarious . . . series of interconnected caricatures graphically illustrates the abrupt changes in prose writing brought on by surrealist aesthetics."--San Francisco Chronicle
"The works that Crevel left us indicate that he was one of the most original, gifted French novelists of the century."--San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Crevel remains one of the most readable surrealists. . . . [H]e is a beautiful writer, beautifully translated. His liquid language tumbles along, powered by his strong descriptions, by his love of Freudian wordplay--rarely is a cigar just a cigar--and by his strong Communist beliefs."--Publishers Weekly
"This classic surrealistic novel satirizes capitalism, the Catholic Church, and fascism, using risque language and vivid, dreamlike imagery. . . . Crevel creates absurd little scenes that degenerate wittily but grotesquely into sexual vignettes."--Library Journal
"A work of demanding complexity, Putting My Foot in It operates on many levels. . . . Fun and fulfillment do await the reader up to Crevel's challenge; but come prepared to fight."--Lambda Book Report
"Crevel constructs a biting satire of hypocrisy and affectation in the literary circles of his era. . . . This admirable translation opens to many new readers the funny, tragic, and courageous world of Rene Crevel."--World Literature Today
"The scathing and satiric critique of bourgeoisie attitudes and right-wing absurdities makes it clear that although circumstances may be different, the times have not changed too much."--TapRoot Review
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