Product Description

Against the backdrop of Facist Europe, the novel's narrator hastens despairingly from city to city in a sexual and mental nightmare - his internal collapse mirroring the fighting on the streets. Will he identify with history's victims or be seduced by the glamour of its terrible victors?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #594310 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

Fear and Loathing in Western Europe
"Blue of Noon", an unpublished novel that Bataille himself had forgotten, has received some recognition by being published in a Penguin edition. It is a work that, yet again, defies any satisfactory definition. My own idea for an appropriate classification would be 'a Gothic novel'.

The story is interesting enough, though one can't really speak of a plot. We follow one Mr. Troppman, never sober and always sick, through European countries that slowly begin to fall under the insane shadow of German and Italian fascism. This advent of insanity is clearly reflected in his own life - his morbid fascination for corpses (one of the novel's peaks is a sexual encounter above a graveyard), a young woman named Dirty, the Marxist Jew Lazare, the young Xenie, and his wife Edith.

Repulsion seems to be the keyword of the book. Troppman seems to drift through a decadent world worthy of a powerful cleansing, a horrifying apparatus preparing to do just that, and the innocent victims of both. Through his haze of alcohol he tries to find a cause to devote himself to, loathing and lethargy irresistibly following his peaks of devotion. What is quite remarkable is Bataille's ability to inspire physical revolt in the reader in following Troppman's adventures.

"Blue of Noon" is one of the few books that actually made me feel physically unwell reading it. One is constantly swept with Troppman's enthusiasm and disillusion. The successive rapidity of his drinking, crying, vomiting, and lechery; his violent mood swings leaves one feeling as if experiencing a turbulent plain flight. The inability of choosing between the elusive dilemma's Troppman faces finds expression in Bataille's scrambling of the boundaries between beauty and scatology, and the absence of any conclusion to the book leaves the invoked tension lingering after the book is finished.

This is a book the demands re-reading and re-evaluation. That it is partly autobiographical adds a dimension to the understanding of the complicated person Bataille. Furthermore I can only echo Will Self's Introduction: "If you commit yourself to reading Blue of Noon there is no necessity for you to worry about where it's all heading - because your very assent to the journey means that you're incapable of reading a map."

If I was a male french erotica writer in the 30s...
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..

This book changed my life.
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.