![]() ![]() At the heart of this apocalyptic satire lies the outsize figure of Cripure, a nihilistic highschool teacher of philosophy, a monstrous Ahab of the intellect suicidally in quest of his Nietzschean white whale. Guilloux breaks with the tidiness of traditional French fiction to provide a hallucinatory-and tragicomic-vision of a single day in the life (and death) of a small port town in Brittany during the mutinous and revolutionary year of 1917. Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary SupplementĬonsidered a masterpiece by Gide, Malraux, Camus, and Pasternak, Guilloux’s 1935 Blood Dark remains the least known in English of France’s twentieth-century blockbuster novels. ![]() Guilloux’s work deserves to be better known in the anglophone world it’s good news that this major novel has resurfaced in Laura Marris’s attentive and accomplished translation. It’s a masterwork that in France is spoken of in the same breath as Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Sartre’s Nausea….there is a revelatory sense reading Guilloux’s novel that one has found a key text linking the sparkling contempt of Flaubert to the tender resignation of Camus. Laura Marris’s disarmingly colloquial translation-the first in English since 1936, when the book was titled Bitter Victory-makes accessible a novel that chronicles, as though in real time, the transformations the catastrophe of World War I wrought on European civilization. ![]()
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