Library of Babel
10341 Storie sgradevoli
Léon Bloy. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1975 I ed. .
Language: Italian
Rare are the fantastic tales that unveil the unreal and extravagant character of their author. This seems to be the case with Bloy’s Disagreeable Tales, a phantasmagorical manager of a verbal pantomime that reveals the monsters of Religion with impartial fierceness.
Léon Bloy considered the universe as a form of divine cryptography, in which each man is a word, a letter, or perhaps a mere punctuation mark. He denied cosmic space; he maintained that its abysses are nothing but a projection of human consciousness. He sometimes preached that we were already in hell, and that every person is but a demon whose task it is to torture his fellow man. He forged an unmistakable style that, depending on our frame of mind, can be unbearable or wonderful, one of the most vivid in literature: Bloy describes his characters as a perfidious tamer would do.