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Subtle Bodies: A Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel
It is Paris, 1935, and the poet Rene Crevel has turned on the gas stove in his apartment. As death fills the rooms, Crevel dwells on past events that changed his life and ended the peace among the Surrealists. Years earlier, Crevel enacted seances for Andre Breton and his guests. At first, these performances were fraudulent, but soon Crevel found himself overcome with lapses in memory and time. Portents made during the seances came to pass as Breton's friends fell under a morbid influence. While in a trance, Crevel felt his sense of self expand to new levels, subtle bodies of consciousness. Beings he named ''Interlocuters'' began to whisper to him of other worlds, other times. What at first feels like a revelation soon brings Crevel to the depths of despair. In this fantastical biography of Crevel, accomplished Canadian author Peter Dube, explores the famed poet's desires of flesh and verse and experience.
- GenresFiction
106 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2010
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October 23, 2018I hope this short, exquisitely written book is going to get some critical attention.
The full title is Subtle Bodies: A Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel.
Here's the blurb: It is Paris, 1935, and the poet Rene Crevell has turned on the gas stove in his apartment. As death fills the rooms, Crevel dwells on past events that changed his life and ended the peace among the Surrealists.
Not your cheery reading on any level, including political, and how the Paris scene maps over Berlin of the same period, with the shadow of Hitler looming.
Rather than maunder on, let me offer a quotation.
"Imagine a world," I said and stumbled. Visions caught in my throat, dreams in my teeth. I could feel the water rising in my eyes and my tongue thickening. But I found my way and went on, imagine a different world, I repeated. The straight avenues and highways are pushed to the periphery and the heart of the city given over to winding paths, cul-de-sacs, courtyards. White marble and streaked on the frontage of ordinary buildings, pointless corners that open on patches of green. There is no street without a garden, no garden without a monument to sensual pleasure. A world whose proud capitals are made for walking and for resting, rather than for efficiency; for the delights of wasted afternoons, secret rooms, sudden discoveries and for clandestine pleasures you can share or enjoy alone. The highest towers on the continent stretch stretch themselves into the clouds but are intended simply not to make the most of space, but are crowned with steel aerials and generators that tug lightning out of the sky and bounce it from tower to tower in a display that stops the night walker and leaves them sighing.
I keep wanting to go on and on.
The full title is Subtle Bodies: A Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel.
Here's the blurb: It is Paris, 1935, and the poet Rene Crevell has turned on the gas stove in his apartment. As death fills the rooms, Crevel dwells on past events that changed his life and ended the peace among the Surrealists.
Not your cheery reading on any level, including political, and how the Paris scene maps over Berlin of the same period, with the shadow of Hitler looming.
Rather than maunder on, let me offer a quotation.
"Imagine a world," I said and stumbled. Visions caught in my throat, dreams in my teeth. I could feel the water rising in my eyes and my tongue thickening. But I found my way and went on, imagine a different world, I repeated. The straight avenues and highways are pushed to the periphery and the heart of the city given over to winding paths, cul-de-sacs, courtyards. White marble and streaked on the frontage of ordinary buildings, pointless corners that open on patches of green. There is no street without a garden, no garden without a monument to sensual pleasure. A world whose proud capitals are made for walking and for resting, rather than for efficiency; for the delights of wasted afternoons, secret rooms, sudden discoveries and for clandestine pleasures you can share or enjoy alone. The highest towers on the continent stretch stretch themselves into the clouds but are intended simply not to make the most of space, but are crowned with steel aerials and generators that tug lightning out of the sky and bounce it from tower to tower in a display that stops the night walker and leaves them sighing.
I keep wanting to go on and on.
March 11, 2011
(I originally wrote this review for the Montreal Review of Books)
Subtle Bodies is a fascinating little book, a “fictional biography” that takes as its inspiration the life of René Crevel – French writer, idealist, communist, and occasional medium. The real-life Crevel is known largely as a friend and associate of Surrealist Manifesto author André Breton. He was born in 1900 and committed suicide at thirty-five years of age; the book begins at the end, as a dying Crevel combs through his past in a combination of flashback and phantasmagoric hallucination. It’s an ambitious premise, this committing of history to fiction, but Peter Dubé creates both a compelling story and a vivid gloss on a crucial period for art and social movements. It has elements of the portrait-of-the-artist genre, but ultimately Subtle Bodies is a novel about desire, possession, and the struggle toward transformation (personal, social, political), told through layers of narration that overlap like simultaneous dreams.
At the story’s heart is Crevel’s attraction to and friendship with the charismatic and intractably homophobic Breton. Fearing Breton’s disapproval and revulsion, Crevel partly hides his self-discovery as a young gay man in Paris as well as his erotic forays into public cruising grounds and gay enclaves. But Breton remains a central force in Crevel’s life, and the tension between the two men spools out into various shapes over the course of their relationship, mirroring broader tensions between convention and progress, ideas and practice.
Their alliance is cemented early on, when Crevel reveals that he has taken part in a séance – and not only that, but has gone into a trance, describing “crazy things, visions of other times and places, mysterious voices coming through me, prophecies.” Breton is thrilled, and this first experience sets off a string of Surrealist experiments that are ever more bizarre and sinister.
This occult research is the catalyst for Crevel’s voices, the “subtle bodies” that haunt him for the rest of his short life, to emerge. They describe visions that are in turn fantastical, cynical, terrifying, and sexy. They might be manifestations of Crevel’s longings – for intimacy, for revolution – or they might be completely random. Some seem straight out of science fiction, and others are coyly prescient, using a kind of retro-futurist lens. In one passage, Crevel hears of
. . . the fantastic narrative of a library – a vast glittering structure of books, of writing, measureless and beyond counting . . . . the accumulation of the art and knowledge of an almost equally uncountable number of civilizations . . . All of it housed in architecture composed on rigidly binaristic principles. A whole snaking, labyrinthine form built on a system of simple ‘yeses’ and ‘noes,’ blacks and whites, ones and zeroes.
Yes, these “predictions” are a bit disingenuous, but that’s part of the book’s charm. Dubé doesn’t pretend to not know what he knows – or, he admits that he knows we know that he’s just pretending not to know. Not limiting himself to historical evidence and tone, he brings all he has to bear on this novel, which saves it from being a dry lecture on art history or bare-bones biography. Instead, it’s a living work of contemporary fiction.
Dubé’s writing is masterful and evocative, often walking the edge of the overblown and baroque without falling in. Though his passages on sex are among the book’s richest, his eroticism spills into the novel at large, imbuing every experience with a sheen of arousal and intimacy, making us feel the texture and smell of the nightclub, the union hall, the small apartment slowly filling with gas.
Subtle Bodies is an absorbing study in “the strongest dreamers,” as Dubé puts it, the visionary and occasionally insane people who shape the world. These people pass through Crevel, leaving indelible marks, just as Crevel seems to have passed through Dubé; Subtle Bodies is the mark he’s left.
Subtle Bodies is a fascinating little book, a “fictional biography” that takes as its inspiration the life of René Crevel – French writer, idealist, communist, and occasional medium. The real-life Crevel is known largely as a friend and associate of Surrealist Manifesto author André Breton. He was born in 1900 and committed suicide at thirty-five years of age; the book begins at the end, as a dying Crevel combs through his past in a combination of flashback and phantasmagoric hallucination. It’s an ambitious premise, this committing of history to fiction, but Peter Dubé creates both a compelling story and a vivid gloss on a crucial period for art and social movements. It has elements of the portrait-of-the-artist genre, but ultimately Subtle Bodies is a novel about desire, possession, and the struggle toward transformation (personal, social, political), told through layers of narration that overlap like simultaneous dreams.
At the story’s heart is Crevel’s attraction to and friendship with the charismatic and intractably homophobic Breton. Fearing Breton’s disapproval and revulsion, Crevel partly hides his self-discovery as a young gay man in Paris as well as his erotic forays into public cruising grounds and gay enclaves. But Breton remains a central force in Crevel’s life, and the tension between the two men spools out into various shapes over the course of their relationship, mirroring broader tensions between convention and progress, ideas and practice.
Their alliance is cemented early on, when Crevel reveals that he has taken part in a séance – and not only that, but has gone into a trance, describing “crazy things, visions of other times and places, mysterious voices coming through me, prophecies.” Breton is thrilled, and this first experience sets off a string of Surrealist experiments that are ever more bizarre and sinister.
This occult research is the catalyst for Crevel’s voices, the “subtle bodies” that haunt him for the rest of his short life, to emerge. They describe visions that are in turn fantastical, cynical, terrifying, and sexy. They might be manifestations of Crevel’s longings – for intimacy, for revolution – or they might be completely random. Some seem straight out of science fiction, and others are coyly prescient, using a kind of retro-futurist lens. In one passage, Crevel hears of
. . . the fantastic narrative of a library – a vast glittering structure of books, of writing, measureless and beyond counting . . . . the accumulation of the art and knowledge of an almost equally uncountable number of civilizations . . . All of it housed in architecture composed on rigidly binaristic principles. A whole snaking, labyrinthine form built on a system of simple ‘yeses’ and ‘noes,’ blacks and whites, ones and zeroes.
Yes, these “predictions” are a bit disingenuous, but that’s part of the book’s charm. Dubé doesn’t pretend to not know what he knows – or, he admits that he knows we know that he’s just pretending not to know. Not limiting himself to historical evidence and tone, he brings all he has to bear on this novel, which saves it from being a dry lecture on art history or bare-bones biography. Instead, it’s a living work of contemporary fiction.
Dubé’s writing is masterful and evocative, often walking the edge of the overblown and baroque without falling in. Though his passages on sex are among the book’s richest, his eroticism spills into the novel at large, imbuing every experience with a sheen of arousal and intimacy, making us feel the texture and smell of the nightclub, the union hall, the small apartment slowly filling with gas.
Subtle Bodies is an absorbing study in “the strongest dreamers,” as Dubé puts it, the visionary and occasionally insane people who shape the world. These people pass through Crevel, leaving indelible marks, just as Crevel seems to have passed through Dubé; Subtle Bodies is the mark he’s left.
September 19, 2017
Subtitled A Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel, this slim volume begins with the suicide of Surrealist poet Rene Crevel and looks back on his involvement with the French Surrealist movement in flashback. Ambitious, yes – but highly readable. This is no dry art school thesis. Dube finds the heart and soul of this historical figure and lays both bare, painting a marvelously detailed portrait of a man intoxicated by ideas and the myth that springs up around their proponents. Indeed, the subtitle here might also be A Study in Inclusion and Exclusion, because Dube’s Crevel is inordinately preoccupied with both. One of the means Crevel uses to gain entrance into the group of writers and artists who would form the Surrealist movement is faking trances during séances, which were all the rage at the time. Pretending to fall into a state of unconsciousness, he spouts nonsense his audience considers brilliance from beyond. He lies for acceptance—and who has not, at one time or another? Having found inclusion, he is loathe to offend any of the movement’s luminaries for fear of finding himself on the outside of that circle. Dube handles this universal theme with deft shadings of right and wrong. Despite the weight of its ideas, Subtle Bodies is a breathlessly quick read that will linger in your head and resonate in your heart long after its voice has faded. In fact, it just may be the best 90-page book you’ll ever read. Full review at https://outinprintblog.wordpress.com/...
July 7, 2016
After reading some reviews, I was unsure what to expect, but what I found was a well crafted and lucid little book, full of enchanting details. If it wasn't for the fact that a few passages broke the spell for me, I would have given it the full 5 stars; it was, nevertheless, a good story told well. I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent with this book, so thank you very much, monsieur Dubé!
September 29, 2012
While I didn't mind the conceit (speculative fan fiction, nothing more), I did mind the writing, which was awkward, sometimes riotously pretentious, occasionally ungrammatical, and often downright clunky — it had nothing of the flow or poetry of Crevel's fiction. The point of view was confused and sometimes contradictory, and the pronouncements of the "voices" struck me as rather silly (especially in regards to their totally accurate predictions of the future — convenient, I suppose, but a no-brainer for an author writing so many decades after Crevel's death!). Such a short book should have taken me maybe one or two commutes to finish reading, but instead I could only struggle through a couple of pages at a time without losing patience. Now I must go back and reread Crevel to clear my mind of this literature-student-quality experiment.
December 1, 2010
A wonderful marriage of subject and style. Dube’s writing is lush and dreamlike, in keeping with his “fantastical biography” of Surrealist poet René Crevel. The narrator’s voice is poetic, strong and credible. The writing is intense, written from the heart. The narrator’s conversations with the voices that inhabit him and his furtive sexual gropings are vividly and boldly rendered. The book offers valuable historic insight that may inspire readers to explore Crevel’s work.
June 14, 2014
This should probably be a much longer review, but I read this up at the lake last week (where there is no internet) and I wrote down only "Mesmerising language, facinating history, intense imagery." Looking at it now, though, that probably sums up my reactions to this book fairly succinctly.
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