BLUE OF NOON

by Georges Bataille ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 1979

Written in 1935, Bataille's slender, frenzied novella strives to create a state of perverse, erotic complication to correlate with the spasms of both the Spanish Civil War and the early, first days of Nazism. Henri Troppman (too-much-man) is separated from his wife and involved with three different women. There's Lazare, an intense, ugly, unhygienic intellectual (Simone Weft?), with whom he has no sexual relationship but uses as a force for purification through zealotry. And Xenie, a n„if whose innocence he gnaws on nervously. But his heart belongs to ""Dirty"": Dorothea, a German girl of such foul mind and habit and degradation that Troppman, dazzled by her debauchery, can't be potent with her--but sees her as the apotheosis of loathsomeness. Bataille's Sade-ean aesthetic--working evil out by tunneling right through its heart--is only beginning in this early, apprehensive work; the erotic scenes are smudged, unexplicit, but frequently powerful. Just as frequently, they're just silly. Bataille (1897-1962) is sometimes brought into academic discussions of the development of the ""anti-novel,"" and this new look at his experimental fiction--to a far greater extent than the puerile Story of the Eye, (1977, p. 646)--may interest students of Sartre, Sarraute, and Robbe-Grillet.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1979

ISBN: 0714530735

Page Count: -

Publisher: Urizen

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION