SOURCE: Review of Difficult Death, in American Book Review, Vol. 9, Issue 4, September, 1987, p.21.

In the following review, Schwartz examines the surrealist elements in Difficult Death.

Difficult Death is not a particularly difficult novel, but its author, Rene Crevel, remains one of the most contradictory and hence difficult writers produced by the first half of the twentieth century. Along with Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, and others, Crevel participated in the Surrealist movement of the twenties and thirties in Paris. Of that bunch, he was perhaps the most earnest in his attempts to unite the practice of the liberation of desire (Surrealism) with the practice of the liberation of classes (Marxism, as embodied by the Communist Party). Crevel was also a practicing homosexual, which put him in hot water with his own Surrealist colleagues; Breton, the group's ringleader, chief theoretician, and spiritual master, had stated unequivocally that homosexuality...