The Passive Vampire (Art Lit)
The Passive Vampireis a poetic memoir that is also a surrealist living guide and a very sophisticated essay on the connections between objects and human feelings. --Andrei CodrescuWe are lucky to have access to this "lost legend" in English, which will surely become a rediscovered classic and a "must read" for anyone interested in surrealism. --Gwen Dawson, Literary LicenseThe Passive Vampireis not what you think. It's not a book about vampires. It's not a book about passivity. It's not science fiction and it's not a horror story. What it is is challenging, semi-autobiographical, surrealist dissertation, erotic in a removed, intellectual George Bataille sort of way, and a book with a lot to offer but only to those who are open to understanding it. --SalonicaThe book ... is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era's dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. --Irene Gammel,BookforumThat auto-destruction, typical of Luca, was also the essence of the Surrealist project in its Eastern iteration. The artful fracturing of bourgeois French reality became, in a much more politically volatile and sexually repressive milieu, the frantic Othering of the creative self. In Bucharest, especially after the war, there was nothing else left to corrupt.  --ForwardThe Passive Vampireis excellently translated and introduced by Krzyzstof Fijalkowski and is what broadsheets would call "essential reading." It is undoubtedly a "classic" of the surrealist tradition while at the same time the kind of text that puts into question the very notions ofclassicandtradition. Offer yourself to it. --PhosphorMuch ofThe Passive Vampireis, indeed, a 'delirium of interpretation'. There is certainly some appeal to it -- here is a mind thinking and feeling out of most of the conventional boxes -- but also only within limits. --Complete ReviewGhérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.  --Gilles Deleuze,DialoguesLuca's grim, lewd, death-haunted writings puzzle, disgust, and induce laughter; ... [his] poems and prose are as playful and illuminating as they are bizarre and disturbing. -- John Taylor, "Killer Puns"To hear and to see Ghérasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect. --Le MondeThere is no doubt thatThe Passive Vampireshould take its place amongst the essential "classics" of surrealism's history, but, moreover, it provides a valuable stimulus for any current investigations into the workings of chance and its objects, of dream and desire. As the translator, Krzysztof Fijalkowski writes in his excellent introduction, this work is important "as a fixed marker for the questions asked today by those wishing to situate themselves in the continuing stream of a critical surrealist thought." --Kenneth Cox,Mute MagazineThe Passive Vampireexplores our relation to the material world, especially objects, constantly subverting our preconceived ideas about what we see and think. The influence of the French surrealists, particularly Andre Breton'sMad LoveandNadja, is easily felt throughout. Luca's poetic, stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me of why I loved reading the French surrealists so much ... --Heidi Broadhead, OmnivoraciousThe Passive Vampire, also from 1945, but written in 1941, is a surrealist work, but one that goes beyond mere dadaist playfulness and becomes much darker and more disturbing. There is a whiff of sulphur from its pages, and when he writes "the medieval pyres are still burning" you note the date and reflect that perhaps "surrealism" is not quite the mot juste.  --Nicholas Lezard,The Guardian