{"product_id":"babylon-by-rene-crevel","title":"'Babylon' by René Crevel","description":"\u003ch4\u003eRené Crevel occupies a peculiar place in twentieth-century literature: a surrealist, a communist sympathiser, a fierce critic of bourgeois morality, and one of the most tragic figures of the Parisian avant-garde.\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDead by suicide at just thirty-four, his work burns with the intensity of someone writing against every available form of certainty. \u003cem\u003eBabylon\u003c\/em\u003e, first published in 1927, is perhaps his most delirious achievement. The novel unfolds through a series of dreamlike episodes, shifting identities, impossible conversations and hallucinatory transformations. Family life becomes grotesque theatre. Desire slips into absurdity. Logic bends and fractures. Throughout, Crevel treats reality less as a stable condition than as a surface continually ruptured by fantasy, obsession and revolt.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeneath the surrealist spectacle sits a deeply serious project. Crevel is not interested in strangeness for its own sake; he uses it to attack convention, morality, nationalism and the comfortable hypocrisies of modern life. The result feels at times like a collision between Kafka, Cocteau, Lautréamont and early Buñuel, while remaining unmistakably his own.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThis Quartet edition includes Kay Boyle's translation and afterword, preserving one of the most important English-language gateways into a writer whose work remains criminally underread outside specialist surrealist circles. Paperback. Quartet Books, 1988. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, bright interior.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"bower studio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45725873832019,"sku":null,"price":30.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0689\/0268\/2707\/files\/thebowerbooker-2026-06-22T204730.784.png?v=1782125264","url":"https:\/\/bowerbooks.com\/products\/babylon-by-rene-crevel","provider":"bower books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}