Rene Crevel's Babylon (1927), North Point Press, 1985, trans. Kay Boyle.
(Later reprinted by Sun & Moon).

An interesting biographical detail about Crevel from Anna Balakian's preface:

"A student of eighteenth-century rationalism, he was engaged in writing a treatise on Diderot when he encountered the surrealists and, joining this group of iconoclasts, came to believe that Reason had betrayed the mind."

9/2011 update: browsing recently I came upon a French book I would love to read some day, Correspondance de Rene Crevel a Gertrude Stein. (Who knew?)

Babylon could go in my Avant-Garde for the Poor series, with copies in abundance on the internet. (9/2011 update: copies are still pretty easy to find, though it remains out of print.)

Both the North Point and Sun & Moon editions include nineteen photograms by Max Ernst. Here are my favorites:












North Point's description:

Babylon, Rene Crevel's most evocative and moving work [ed: I vote for Difficult Death], is a novel of stylistic elegance and psychological depth that probes the interplay between the rational and the subconscious.

Never before published in English, Babylon is illustrated with nineteen original photograms produced by Max Ernst specifically for the novel.

In Babylon a free-spirited girl watches her father elope with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new fiance, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational Experience.

Among these marionettes of society "the child becoming a woman" pursues her personal dream and seeks a world bathed in an unknown light.

Babylon is a landmark of Surrealist literature, an enduring achievement of one of its leading figures. The noted American writer Kay Boyle has spent years translating the novel and seeing it into print. Her translation sparkles with Crevel's own virtuosity.