Le paysan de Paris
Le paysan de Paris (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism. Unconventional in form -- Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development; it is, in the author's words, "a mythology of the modern." The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. André Breton wrote of this work: "no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city
Print Book, French, ©1926
Librairie Gallimard, Éditions de La nouvelle revue française, Paris, ©1926