SOURCE: “Suicidal tendencies” in Times Literary Supplement, Issue 3788, October, 1974, p. 1138.

In the following review, the critic offers an overview of the new editions to La mort difficile, Mon corps et moi, and Les pieds dans le plat.

That René Crevel was one of the Surrealist writers who committed suicide is well known. But much less is known about what sort of a writer and what sort of a person he was. This re-edition of three of his important books (a fourth is to follow shortly) goes a long way towards filling in the gaps.

Born in Paris in 1900, Crevel was brought up to be a comfortable, conforming bourgeois. When he was fourteen, however, on an evening when his mother was giving a dinner party, his father hanged himself, for no reason that was ever discovered, and the guests and the child were called in to look at the...