The Passive Vampire: (No. 1 Art Lit)

Originally published in 1945 in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 in the magazine La part du sable. Luca, whom Gilles Deleuze referred to as one of the greatest poets, attempts here to transmit the "shudder" evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as André Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between "objective chance" and delirium. Impossible to define, The Passive Vampire is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation -- it is 18 photographs of "objectively offered objects," a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms while illuminating the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.

About the Author :
Luca was born July 23, 1913 in Bucharest into a liberal Jewish family. His father was a tailor. Luca, who spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French, traveled frequently to Paris in the late 1930s where he became acquainted with the Surrealists. World War II and Romania's official anti-Semitism forced him into internal exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he helped to found the Romanian Surrealist Group. He finally left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris, where he died on February 9, 1994, at the age of 80, by throwing himself into the Seine.

Review :
That 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. --Forward The 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, Bookforum To hear and to see Gherasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect. --Le Monde