La Mort difficile

“The game of telling everything is one of the most tragic inventions of present-day anxiety. Under the guise of unmasking the human, and through the anguished relentlessness brought to it, one arrives at a conception of sincerity that strikes me as properly inhuman. Tell everything, truly? The bold but bravado-free sincerity that gives this book its value as a human document harms its literary value. I hardly care for this abstract style (…) but there is in René Crevel’s work a sense of pain and a human seriousness that compel sympathy.” (Denis de Rougemont, in “[Compte rendu] René Crevel, La Mort difficile,” Bibliothèque universelle et Revue de Genève, Geneva, May 1927, p. 690).

A major text by Crevel, blending autobiographical obsession with despair and revolt, linking artistic creation and revolutionary action through the subversion of writing.