Hell

No one who has ever read this remarkable novel and looked at human life through Barbusse's peephole can ever forget the experience.--Robert Baldick

It is Barbusse, not Gide, not Proust and not Maurois whose work marks the great turning point in French twentieth-century literature.--Jean Favrille

Hell is the most highly focused study of voyeurism ever written. A young man staying in a Paris boarding house finds a hole in the wall above his bed. Through this he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors. Marriage, adultery, lesbianism, religion and death are all seen through this small spy hole.

Decades ahead of its time Hell shocked and scandalized the reviewing public when first released in English. Even so, The New Republic praised the beauty of the book's nervous yet fluid rhythms. . . . Every simile is faultlessly keyed. The book sweeps away life's illusions.

Author: Henri Barbusse
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Published: 04/01/1995
Pages: 266
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781885983015
ISBN10: 1885983018
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary

About the Author

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a French novelist and active member of the French Communist Party. A WWI veteran, Barbusse became popular upon the 1916 release of his first novel, Le Feu. Later, he moved to Moscow and joined the Bolshevik Party, spending the rest of his life in the Soviet Union and France.

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