Le Bleu du ciel
Signed presentation inscription: “à Raymond [Queneau], bien amicalement, Georges.”
“I believe it: only the suffocating, impossible ordeal gives the author the means to reach the distant vision awaited by a reader weary of the narrow limits imposed by convention.”
Bataille’s writing dares to confront the unspeakable, the infamous, the unbearable, the obscene — in short, the impossible within a civilized society. In one of his inscriptions, Bataille aptly wrote of this book that it “answers the temptation of the impossible.” Written in 1935, the novel is startling in its premonitory quality: describing a Hitler Youth parade, Bataille concludes, “I saw them, not far from me, bewitched by the desire to go to their death. Hallucinating boundless fields where, one day, they would advance, laughing in the sun, leaving behind them the dying and the dead.”
A very fine copy.