Die Is Cast

The Die Is Cast is a novel by Robert Desnos that was published in 1943. It is a departure from his earlier surrealist prose to a social realism that drew on his life experience and career as a journalist. The novel portrays a band of opium, cocaine, and heroin users in Paris, offering a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides, and the isolation of addiction. Despite being published during the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, the book remains timely and relevant today.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 200 pages
\n Publication date: 17 August 2021
\n Publisher: Wakefield Press
\n

Published in 1943, just a year before its author was arrested by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities, The Die Is Cast marked a significant departure for Robert Desnos. This marked a shift from his earlier, frenetic Surrealist prose to a social realism that drew as much from his life experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own experiences with drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George, Desnos portrayed a band of opium, cocaine, and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris. Despite being published in occupied Paris, years before the Beat Generation established "junkie literature," it remains a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides, and the flattened solitude of the addict. An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as a timely piece of work, as relevant as it was untimely when it first appeared.

Robert Desnos (1900–45) was Surrealism's most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and passed through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.

\n Weight: 295g\n
Dimension: 203 x 137 x 18 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781939663696\n \n