Jonathan Mirsky

Angkor Where?

Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle

By

Yale University Press 256pp £25 order from our bookshop

I CAN THINK of many titles for this sometimes intriguing book – ‘The Sky, the Sea and the Jungle: Asia and the Surrealists’, for example – but I would never have suggested ‘A Surrealist Love Triangle’. That gives the impression that it’s primarily about the unhappy three-way relationship, lasting from 1921 until 1924, of the French poet Paul Eluard, his Russian wife Gala (one of the most dangerous women I have ever read about; she later hooked up with Salvador Dali), and the German painter Max Ernst. One might assume that the book follows their affair from Germany to Paris to Saigon. That would be a terrific story.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    Follow Us