SOURCE: Reveiw of Babylon, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August, 1985, p. 5.

In the following review, Rubin praises the wit and satire of Crevel's work in Babylon.

Often, we feel we are drowning in an ocean of print. This illusion of plenty obscures the surprising gaps in what is actually available to us. Who would have thought, for instance, that a classic of the surrealist movement, Rene Crevel's novel Babylon, published in French in 1927 with illustrations by Max Ernst, has only just now been translated into English 50 years after Crevel's death at age 35, the first of his works to appear in our tongue?

Kay Boyle's brilliant translation, which mirrors the exquisitely witty precision of Crevel's imagination, was well worth the wait. We tend to associate surrealism with the strange, the arbitrary, the anomalous. Yet Babylon, which contains a mocking portrait of the cut-and-dried logic of the Positivists, has...