Blood Dark [Paperback]

Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement.

Blood Darktells 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 ofCritique of Pure Reason—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 titledBitter Victory—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’sJourney to the End of the Night and Sartre’sNausea….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,The Wall Street Journal


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,Times Literary Supplement

“Considered a masterpiece by Gide, Malraux, Camus, and Pasternak, Guilloux’s 1935Blood Darkremainl“G