Customer Reviews

Blue of Noon

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's [illegitimate] children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with [prostitutes] and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

This was the first of Bataille's books that I have read/am reading. I stopped at the store today and got another, L'Abbe C. I read Story of the Eye last week (that one was my favorite). As I read (devoured?) Blue of Noon it was like a dawning, an uncovering of a type of writing that I've been trying to find an example of, since it is the style of most of the things I write. Bataille combines his emotions and feelings and anguish and disgust and frustration with the story of this guy and his relationships with various women. It's hard for me to describe what this book did for me because I understand the comparisons and allusions, but taken exactly as it is without trying to find any hidden meaning will still provide for excellent reading. I'd say dismiss any and all negative reviews and get this book, then get Story of the Eye, then The Accursed Share, then everything else this brilliant man has written..

I don't really know how to begin this review. There's not really a good angle to approach this remarkable and beautiful book. What do you do when the very things that attract you to a woman disgust you and yet they turn you on at the same time. In this novel Henri and his wife, whom he sometimes refers to by giving her the name "Dirty" are driving each other insane. They love each other but the very intensity of their personalities makes them fated to never be at peace. This is the root of their despair, that they both realize the futility of being with each other. Henri sinks into dissipation and having relationships with women he thoroughly despises. The first, a woman named Lazare, he refers to as a "raven of ill omen". She is so ugly and despicable but he loves her in a way simply because she reeks of death. He wants to surround himself with an environment that reflects his state of mind. Dirty is dying and you sense that in reality her spirit has already passed on and its simply her image dragging Henri into her own horrible hell. Most of the book takes place in Spain just as the Spanish Civil War is beginning and there are all kinds of portents of the coming World War which adds to the darkness of the characters. This book was brillantly done. The characters seemed so real because they did hurt each other, because they did have unhealthy obsessions which they revel in instead of hiding them within. They give full vent to their joys just as much as their miseries. This is the first book I have read by Bataille and I am curious to see what his other work is like.

I'm pretty fondly disposed to Bataille, but Blue of Noon was a disappointment. The title and the cover are wonderful, and having read Story of the Eye and L'abbe C just before it, I expected great things. But what I received instead was a drawling, shabby, painfully tedious and remarkably unmemorable narrative ramble. It isn't as disturbing as Story of the Eye, and it isn't as interesting as L'abbe C, and it feels much shorter in the surreal atmospheric magic that made those two books worthwhile. If you've already read and enjoyed Bataille, you may want to check Blue of Noon out, but it is not one of his better works.

Not nearly as memorable as the surrealist pornography of "The Story of an Eye," nor as thought-provoking as his study of the tangling of the great death and the "little death" of orgasm in his sex-and-mortality, violence-and-the sacred exploration "Erotism," this slim novel, as the author's uncomfortable tone betrays in its afterword, appears half-finished and abandoned rather than meant as it is for publication.

Lazare's fanatical devotion to the Left and especially Dirty's penchant for decadent and unsanitary lifestyle choices remain the most powerfully characterized moments, but too much of the novel remains as jittery and haphazard-- albeit Bataille argues in the afterword he meant it to be read as such-- as comparatively mundane next to the strong opening vignette of Troppmann and Dirty in one of literature's most effectively rendered dives, even by Parisian standards.

As one who has read plenty of Céline, a bit of Sade, and some of Sartre's fiction, this novel held some interest. Yet, it seems too slack, too dragged down by ennui. Far less erotic than a reader of "The Story of An Eye" might expect, this instead recalls Bataille's protege, Pierre Klossowski (his novels have been reviewed by me on Amazon; he's the brother of the painter Balthus) and his philosophical protagonists who also are prone more to shuffling about rather than coupling energetically. The extravagant claims left by readers here appear unfounded, given the turgid pace of its pages and the uneven tone of the narrative.

Blue of Noon is a neglected work in Bataille's corpus, but it is a great work. Set in Paris in the 1930s, the tormented narrator struggles to balance his role as a normal husband with his pathological impulses. He is drawn to necrophilia, to prostitution, to death. Dirty and Xenie are the major women in his life-objects of repulsive/attractive filth and decay. Bataille also takes us to Spain for the budding revolution; there are extraordinary snapshots of the emergence of Fascism in the latter pages of the novel. But is this a political work? Is it even possible to say? Surely Bataille thought that pathology was political/sociological. Yet one should read this as an aestheticization of transgression first-all attempts to frame the work into social categories will prove to be inadequate.

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's bastard children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with whores and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

Blue of Noon disturbed those dark corners previously controlled by my Victorian pretension and pathological grasping. Anyone suffering from either will find liberation in Bataille.

A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

According to Georges Bataille's autobiographical note, LE BLEU DU CIEL ("The Blue of the Sky") was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.

The descending night darkens these pages.

Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann ("Too-Much-Man") and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman's supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.

Their only desire is to besmirch whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.

By muddying whatever is "sacred," they maintain the force of "the sacred."

As a historical document, BLEU DU CIEL is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the "red nun" Simone Weil (as Lazare).

It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, although not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.

As the night materializes, the blue of the sky disappears.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Ok ok, so I understand the necrophilia as a metaphor for warmongering, but that doesn't mean I want to read it. There are many better books that deal with war atrocities in a much more intelligent way. "The Tin Drum" for instance has all the horror, without all the "sex with dead people" stuff. Avoid this book....better yet, bury it in the back garden...it's internment is long overdue.