Saint Ghetto of the Loans (first edition 1950) is no longer a more or less forgotten key work of French lettrism, one of the many revolutionary avant-garde groups of post–World War II years in Paris, best known as the immediate precursor of situationism (all these groups were also circling around existentialism, the then-dominating new form of living, thinking, and writing). Thanks to the joint efforts of an American publisher, Ugly Duckling Presse, and its initial translator, Michael Kasper, the work resurfaced in 2006 and is now splendidly reissued in a carefully edited volume (a new French edition has been announced with the éditions du Sandre, but its publication has been postponed, so that even for French readers this is the only currently available edition).
The very title of the book, Saint Ghetto of the Loans, is already a synthesis of its theme as well as certain aspects...