Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement.
Louis Guilloux (1899-1980) worked as a left-wing organizer, a literary translator, and an interpreter for the American army in France. Laura Marris is a writer, translator, and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. Alice Kaplan is the author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University.
"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. 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.” —Sam Sacks, The
Wall Street Journal
"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." —Adrian
Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement
“Considered 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 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. 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’s Le Sang noir
here emerges afresh—and urgent—in this new translation by Laura
Marris.” —Richard Sieburth
“We come upon Blood Dark with something of a shock. For here is a
novel projected in the grand style of the nineteenth century, a
mountain of a novel, sprawling . . . out of which there emerges a
great tragic figure.” —Harold Strauss, The New York Times
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