{"product_id":"blood-dark-isbn-9781681371450","title":"Blood Dark","description":"\u003cb\u003eSet during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlood Dark\u003c\/i\u003e tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of \u003ci\u003eCritique of Pure Reason\u003c\/i\u003e—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.\"Laura Marris’s disarmingly colloquial translation—the first in English since 1936, when the book was titled \u003ci\u003eBitter Victory\u003c\/i\u003e—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 \u003ci\u003eJourney to the End of the Nigh\u003c\/i\u003et and Sartre’s \u003ci\u003eNausea\u003c\/i\u003e….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, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Considered a masterpiece by Gide, Malraux, Camus, and Pasternak, Guilloux’s 1935 \u003ci\u003eBlood Dark \u003c\/i\u003eremains 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 \u003ci\u003eLe Sang noir\u003c\/i\u003e here emerges afresh—and urgent—in this new translation by Laura Marris.” —Richard Sieburth\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We come upon \u003ci\u003eBlood Dark\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLouis Guilloux\u003c\/b\u003e (1899–1980) was born in Brittany, where  he would spend most of his life. His father was a shoemaker and a  socialist. At the local high school, he was taught by the controversial  philosopher Georges Palante, who would serve as inspiration for the  character of Cripure in \u003ci\u003eBlood Dark\u003c\/i\u003e. Guilloux worked briefly as a  journalist in Paris, but soon began writing short stories for  newspapers and magazines, and then published his debut novel, \u003ci\u003eLa Maison du peuple\u003c\/i\u003e,  in 1927. During World War II, his house was a meeting place for the  French Resistance; on one occasion it was searched by the Vichy police  and Guilloux was taken in for questioning. Following the war, he was an  interpreter at American military tribunals in Brittany, and the  incidents of racial injustice that he witnessed in the American army  would form the basis of his 1976 book OK, Joe. In addition to his many  novels—including \u003ci\u003eLe Pain des rêves\u003c\/i\u003e (1942) and \u003ci\u003eJeu de patience\u003c\/i\u003e (1949)—Guilloux also translated the work of Claude McKay, John  Steinbeck, and several of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLaura Marris\u003c\/b\u003e’s recent translations include Christophe Boltanski’s \u003ci\u003eThe Safe House\u003c\/i\u003e and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, Paol Keineg’s \u003ci\u003eTriste Tristan and Other Poems\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Cortland Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAsymptote\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Brooklyn Rail\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlice Kaplan\u003c\/b\u003e is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eLooking for “The Stranger”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Collaborator\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDreaming in French\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eFrench Lessons: A Memoir\u003c\/i\u003e. Kaplan’s book \u003ci\u003eThe Interpreter\u003c\/i\u003e explores Guilloux’s experience as an interpreter for the U.S. Army  courts-martial in Brittany in the summer of 1944. She is also the  translator of Guilloux’s novella \u003ci\u003eOK, Joe\u003c\/i\u003e, which inspired her research for \u003ci\u003eThe Interpreter\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303193039077,"sku":"NP9781681371450","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681371450.jpg?v=1767722782","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/blood-dark-isbn-9781681371450","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}