Book description
AndrĂ© Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the GaspĂ© Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge PercĂ© Rock-its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty-as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggressionâŠ
Why read it?
1 author picked Arcanum 17 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
AndrĂ© Bretonâs book is a patchwork of literary forms, crazy-quilted together to form an amazing image of the world during World War II. At that time, Breton was in exile from Nazi-occupied France, and he visited Quebec in Canada to experience again the comfort and familiarity of being in a French-speaking land.
The book is part poetry and part prose, sometimes a journal, at other times a political meditation, and then a series of stories from mythology and the mystic Tarot. Bretonâs ultimate take on living through a world war for the second time is that our daily existence needsâŠ
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