7.2 /10 1 Votes7.2
Translator Erik Butler Publication date 1894 Published in english 2015 | 3.6/5 Goodreads Country France Publisher Dentu Originally published 1894 Page count 369 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title Histoires désobligeantes Similar Sweating Blood, The Woman Who Was, The Trumpets of Jericho, Nightmares of an Ether‑Drinker, The book of Monelle | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Disagreeable Tales (French: Histoires désobligeantes) is an 1894 short story collection by the French writer Léon Bloy. It consists of 30 tales set in Paris, focused on criminality, perversions and other subject matters typical of the decadent movement. The common theme is the faith in God in a time of human spiritual crisis. An English translation by Erik Butler was published in 2015 by Wakefield Press.
Reception
Erik Morse wrote for The Paris Review in 2015: "What distinguishes Bloy's 'tales' from those written by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Poe, and Lautréamont is the marked absence of any sensualist or proto-surrealist tone with its ecstatic invocations of the flesh, like those that characterize Romantic literature since William Blake. Rather, Bloy's bilious allusions to excrement ('ordure'), genitalia, rot, disease, and waste descend from a negative theology, which extols a mystical, self-mortification[.] ... For Bloy, all physical pleasures are diversion or, worst yet, satanic temptation, so it is only through intense suffering and punishment that his characters can expiate their sins."