Search results for ""author léon bloy""

First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describes the atrocities of war in 30 tales of horror and inhumanity from the pen of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," Léon Bloy. Writing with blood, sweat, tears and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own experiences as a guerilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and pathos, and alternating between cutting detail and muted anguish. From heaps of corpses, monstrous butchers, cowardly bourgeois, bloody massacres, seas of mud, drunken desperation, frightful disfigurement, grotesque hallucinations and ghoulish means of personal revenge, a generalized portrait of suffering is revealed that ultimately requires a religious lens: for through Bloy’s maniacal nationalism and frenetic Catholicism, it is a hell that emerges here, a 19th-century apocalypse that tore a country apart and set the stage for a century of atrocities that were yet to come. Léon Bloy (1846–1917) was born to a freethinking yet stern father and a pious Spanish–Catholic mother in southwestern France. Nourishing anti-religious sentiments in his youth, his outlook changed radically when he moved to Paris and came under the influence of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. In his subsequent years of writing pamphlets, novels, essays, poetry and a multi volume diary, Bloy earned his dual nicknames of "The Pilgrim of the Absolute" through his unorthodox devotion to the Catholic Church and "The Ungrateful Beggar" through his endless reliance on the charity of friends to support him and his family.

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Written in the 1890s, Leon Bloy's masterful novel has had an immeasurable effect on all European Catholic writing since. (Bloy was responsible for the conversion of Jacques and Räissa Maritain in 1905, and they referred to him as their godfather.) It is an extraordinary book, powerful in the manner of dos Passos, and yet spiritual in the manner of the Bible. It is the story of a woman who is abysmally poor, brutally treated and exploited by her parents, living in the gutters of Paris, yet she retains the spiritual outlook and purity of a saint. We are spared no brutality, yet there are scenes of the most tender beauty.The woman, Clotilde, becomes an artist's model, meeting all the great French writers, among them the gloomy and magnificent Marchenoir, who is Bloy himself. They are all impressed by the depth of her thoughts and feelings; she finally marries one of them. They are pitifully poor, and the pages that cover the birth and death of their child shock with horror while moving the reader in their tragic beauty and tenderness––for this is Bloy, always hovering between death and ecstasy. Left a widow, Clotilda finds her true vocation, a vocation of poverty. She is the woman who is poor, no other words describe her more accurately. The novel ends with those famous words of extraordinary optimism: "There is only one misery…not to be saints."

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