- Source: Disagreeable Tales
Disagreeable Tales (French: Histoires désobligeantes) is an 1894 short story collection by the French writer Léon Bloy. It consists of thirty tales set in Paris, focusing on criminality, perversions, and other subject matters typical of the Decadent movement. The common theme is the faith in God in a time of human spiritual crisis.
The book is dedicated "To my dear friend Eugène Borrel, in devout remembrance of Our Lady of Ephesus, who places us so far away from contemporary garbage."
Stories
The English titles listed here are from the Wakefield Press edition. An edition held by the Bibliothèque nationale appears to contain two additional stories, "L'appel du Gouffre" and "L'Ami des Bêtes", though they are in fact excerpts from Bloy's novel The Woman Who Was Poor. Both pieces appear in the Snuggly Books edition.
Nearly all the stories in Histoires désobligeantes were originally published in Gil Blas; the date given after the French title refers to the issue in which the work first appeared.
English translations
Histoires Désobligeantes has been translated into English twice, first by Erik Butler for Wakefield Press in 2015, and then by Brian Stableford, with an introduction and footnotes, as The Tarantula's Parlor and Other Unkind Tales for Snuggly Books in 2016.
Reception
Erik Morse wrote for The Paris Review in 2015, "What distinguishes Bloy's 'tales' from those written by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Poe, and Lautréamont is the marked absence of any sensualist or proto-surrealist tone with its ecstatic invocations of the flesh, like those that characterize Romantic literature since William Blake. Rather, Bloy's bilious allusions to excrement ('ordure'), genitalia, rot, disease, and waste descend from a negative theology, which extols a mystical, self-mortification[.] ... For Bloy, all physical pleasures are diversion or, worst yet, satanic temptation, so it is only through intense suffering and punishment that his characters can expiate their sins."
The Complete Review and The Pan Review both praise Butler's translation.
References
External links
"Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader" by Alberto Manguel at Geist