Blue Library
9857 Due storie diaboliche
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly. Introduction by Mario Praz
1977 / 168 PAGES.
Language: Italian
Daughters of excess and transgression, the protagonists of Les Diaboliques bring into the routine of male sensuality and selfishness a desire that can extend to cannibalism and a cold determination in debauchery and evil.
Barbey d’Aurevilly's tales emerge from a surreal and visionary imagination, indebted to a figurative côté that spans from the masters of dreamlike reality, such as Goya, Füssli and Wiertz, to a certain late Romantic-Decadent symbolism. The author’s aristocratic and reactionary moralistic snobbery, fraught with contradictions, conceals the face of a misfit dreamer, alienated from the reality in which he lives. He dares to delve into the abysses of the human soul, dwelling on psychological deformity, extreme experiences, the mysterious ambiguity of the feminine universe, unspoken morbidness and the fleeting presence of monstrous, bizarre and demonic shadows lurking behind a falsely reassuring façade. Unfinished like nightmarish dreams, his stories compel astonished and scandalised readers to confront their own deepest fears.