"Sens-Plastiquehas now been a companion of mine for nearly 20 years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." -W.H. Auden After seeing an azalea looking at him in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens (and realizing that he himself was becoming a flower), Malcolm de Chazal began composing what would eventually become his unclassifiable masterpiece, Sens-Plastique, which would take its final form in 1948. Containing over 2,000 aphorisms, axioms and allegories, the book was immediately hailed as a work of genius by André Breton, Francis Ponge, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Braque. Embraced by the Surrealists as one of their own, Chazal chose to avoid all literary factions and steadfastly anchored himself in his solitary life as a bachelor mystic on the island nation of Mauritius, where he would proceed to write books and paint for the rest of his life. Sens-Plastiqueemploys a strange humor and an alchemical sensibility to offer up an utterly original world vision that unifies neo-science, philosophy and poetry into a new form of writing. Mapping every human body part, facial expression and emotion onto the natural kingdom through subconscious thinking, Chazal presents a world in which humankind is not just made in the image of God, but Nature is made in the image of humankind: a sensual, synesthetic world in which everything in the universe, be it animal, vegetable, mineral or human, employs a spiritual copula. Malcolm de Chazal(1902-81) was a Mauritian writer and painter. Forsaking a career in the sugar industry, he spent the majority of his life in a solitary, mystical pursuit of the continuity between man and nature.

A great masterpiece - first published in 1948 and now with a foreword by W. H. Auden. The work has attained near-legendary status and readers have discovered in de Chazal's brilliant aphorisms what the author himself described as a new view of life' requiring a unique title. Although two previous selections of Weiss's remarkable translations of this major work have been published, no complete edition of the translation has been available until now.'

Malcolm de Chazal Malcolm de Chazal (1902-1981) - was born in Mauritius to French parents... To begin with he was a writer and a poet. His most notable books being: Sens Plastique and Sens Magique... W.H. Auden said of him that he was ..".the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." And Andre Breton hailed him as a surrealist. In 1950, at the suggestion of Georges Braque, he began to paint... Better known in the French-speaking world - as an influential artist who stands alone in both his approach and his style - he is now becoming appreciated in the English-speaking world as a free-thinker who is deserving of his place in art history. He was a surrealist, a mystic and an alchemist... Occasionally one glimpses similarities between his work and Van Gogh's, Matisse's and Derain's. He has been described as a post-modernist expressionist. Or, possibly he could be defined as a post-Fauvist. If that is what he was, then he was the essence of what that approach was supposed to embody in its purest form: an animalistic and feral interpretation of the world through bold colours, harnessing the emotions whilst rejecting a rigid representational approach to art. But ultimately, and this is what is exciting about Chazal, he is unlike any other artist... or writer. Magical Sense - is the translation by the author and poet Jean Bonnin of Sense Magique. Seven hundred and fifty-five aphorisms that look at nature, light, colour and sensuality in a unique way. This is one of Malcolm de Chazal's most significant works that should be appreciated for its beauty, originality and quirky otherworldliness. A unique man whose painting and writing is finally beginning to get the appreciation it deserves."

Considered radical at the time, Breton's ideas today seem almost prescient, yet breathtaking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit. Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love, loss, aggression, war, pacifism and feminism.

An influential social thinker, the late Richard Harvey Brown was professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication, published by Yale University Press.