Sweating Blood (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781939663177)

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," L駮n 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. L駮n 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-Am馘馥 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.

Author: L駮n Bloy
ISBN-10: 1939663172
ISBN-13: 9781939663177
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Language: English
Published: 05/24/2016
Pages: 232
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d