En el cielo | Octave Mirbeau | book new | sale

Octave Mirbeau

Barataria : Bárbaros | 2006

182 | 4h 19m

spanish | softcover | new | sale

20cm x 16cm | 295gr

In Heaven is a novel where the stories fit into each other, which breaks with all realistic concerns (the setting of the mountain peak, above all, borders on symbolism) and manifests a total disregard for conventional rules of composition. The story does not obey a rigid logical or chronological order, and ends abruptly, without returning to the first narrator. In Heaven also expresses a pre-existentialist, skeptical conception of the human condition, in which the influence of Pascal is felt, a secular Pascal, of course. Man, a "creeping grass", appears lost between two infinities, in a universe without pattern or reason that, by not responding to his measure, condemns him to an absurd life, to anguish, loneliness and lack of communication. Through Lucien – a painter to whom he attributes works by Van Gogh, especially The Starry Night – Mirbeau exposes the artist's tragedy. The demanding artist who sees the world with his own eyes instead of being content with academic optics or producing for the market. Man doomed to run eternally after an ideal that is stolen from him again and again because the means at his disposal, his brain and his "guilty" hand, never reach the height of the ideal.