For over ten years I had been reading this book--attempting to grasp the vocabulary which is sometimes in French, (with no page of definitions) and sometimes in English. One's task is to first keep track of ideas presented in the first chapter, then with your deep and profound pre-knowledge of Levinas, Blanchot, and Bataille, you can try to ferret out what is the strange, echoing discussion all three of them had amongst and between their works. The premise is that they DID read each other and responded in their own works to each other, but only Libertson gained some intuition of what these correlations might be. An excellent effort, hard to understand, must love exotic French theory and Martinus Nijhoff books. European all the way.

"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.

At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.

This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.

For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.

I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.

Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages).

I'm pretty fondly disposed to Bataille, but Blue of Noon was a disappointment. The title and the cover are wonderful, and having read Story of the Eye and L'abbe C just before it, I expected great things. But what I received instead was a drawling, shabby, painfully tedious and remarkably unmemorable narrative ramble. It isn't as disturbing as Story of the Eye, and it isn't as interesting as L'abbe C, and it feels much shorter in the surreal atmospheric magic that made those two books worthwhile. If you've already read and enjoyed Bataille, you may want to check Blue of Noon out, but it is not one of his better works.

I don't really know how to begin this review. There's not really a good angle to approach this remarkable and beautiful book. What do you do when the very things that attract you to a woman disgust you and yet they turn you on at the same time. In this novel Henri and his wife, whom he sometimes refers to by giving her the name "Dirty" are driving each other insane. They love each other but the very intensity of their personalities makes them fated to never be at peace. This is the root of their despair, that they both realize the futility of being with each other. Henri sinks into dissipation and having relationships with women he thoroughly despises. The first, a woman named Lazare, he refers to as a "raven of ill omen". She is so ugly and despicable but he loves her in a way simply because she reeks of death. He wants to surround himself with an environment that reflects his state of mind. Dirty is dying and you sense that in reality her spirit has already passed on and its simply her image dragging Henri into her own horrible hell. Most of the book takes place in Spain just as the Spanish Civil War is beginning and there are all kinds of portents of the coming World War which adds to the darkness of the characters. This book was brillantly done. The characters seemed so real because they did hurt each other, because they did have unhealthy obsessions which they revel in instead of hiding them within. They give full vent to their joys just as much as their miseries. This is the first book I have read by Bataille and I am curious to see what his other work is like.

"L'Abbe C" is the story of Robert, a priest who is so upstanding he is called "L'Abbe" ("the abbot"), and his twin brother Charles, a "libertine" (i.e., a playboy, or man of loose morals). Charles has a sexual relationship with Eponine, a woman whose morals approach his, but Eponine is attracted to Robert, making for sexual tension. Worse, Robert is secretly attracted to Eponine, making for psychological tension. We learn early in the book that the story will turn out badly for all parties involved, each suffering in their own way, so it is not revealing a secret to say the tensions in this multi-faceted relationship do not lead to a healthy outcome. The story is told mostly from Charles's point of view.

Robert breaks down psychologically, fainting at a church service he is attempting to deliver with Eponine in the congregation. Robert begins drinking heavily, and begins stalking Eponine's home in the dead of night, leaving behind sick signs of his presence. He can no longer discern good from evil, nor morality from immorality, and eventually cracks altogether, leaving town for a hotel on the outskirts, where he stays with two semi-professional ladies of looser morals than Eponine's. The novel twists a few more times from there, then resolves itself tragically.

The book is essentially a reflection on morality and cowardice, the latter being the human element required for maintaining morality, but also for being true to one's self, which can sometimes oppose what we believe to be moral. While it has an interesting theme, it is written almost entirely for shock value (or at least what passes for shock value for an author born in 1897, and writing in 1950), but does not convincingly expound upon or communicate its theme to the reader. For one instance, we are never convinced Robert was so pious to begin with. He does not earn his title "L'Abbe" in our eyes, so we are not affected by his supposed turning away from piety during the book.

Bataille has written this book in an old-fashioned style, almost Victorian, using wrenching emotional adjectives, and over-romanticized means of communicating inner thoughts. It is a bit overdone for the "been there, done that" reader of today, and not handsome enough for the admirer of 19th-century literature. (Also, there is some reference to Nazis near the end of the story. Judging from another Bataille book, "Blue of Noon", Bataille seems to throw Nazis into the bargain when he can no longer figure out where to go, and when he needs to show someone else as depraved as his other characters. The reference to Nazis is unecessary and superficial.)

This is a very short work, 158 pages, written in a halting diarized style in most parts. It's almost a pamphlet, hardly a full book. In the final analysis, this is a sexually frank and morally candid tale, but one that is philosophical and even memorable. It may not be great literature, the ending may be a bit incongruous, and it may read as though it is fifty years older than it really is, but it was an interesting little volume nonetheless. I subtract a star, however, because it is a tiny little book at a full-size price.

Bataille's L'Abbe C provides you with a reading atmosphere of unsettling density akin to that of the more famous Story of the Eye, while lacking the flood of relentless pornographic imagery that can be witnessed in that novel. The book can be tedious and pretentious at times (as with anything by Bataille), but it remains a rather fascinating literary diversion. The story, which seems to concern the muddled web of feelings existing between a pair of brothers who are in love with the same mysterious woman, is presented in too surreal a fashion to be particularly coherent; however, the most immediately accessible merits of Bataille's literature have less to do with understanding specifically what is happening, and more to do with the dream-like sense (or rather nightmare-like sense) of profundity provoked. Think of one of David Lynch's better films in the form of a french novel from the early part of the century, and you'll be on the right track. L'abbe C isn't as compulsively readable as the disturbing pornographic masterpiece Story of the Eye, but will still provide the patient reader with numerous rewards. The mad priest's diary, at the end of the novel, is of particular interest.

One should re-name this book: Useless - a Form Guide.

This book claims to introduce a whole new perspective of 20th- century art which has so far been repressed. We are led to believe that it is necessary to add a third and foreign element into the conceptualization of art. The basis on which this whole endeavour is anchorred is the philosophical "Informe" of Georges Bataille. However, the arguments presented by the authors are weak as the whole book is stuffed with analyses purporting to reveal the operational tool of "informe". Any attempt at explaining the original intentions of Bataille's "informe" is so brief and convenient so as to get the reader lost in its adjectival superfluity. There is never any attempt to explain the introduction of "informe" into art and its necessity. The authors make claims to be liberating our thinking from the semantic and that this project is only the beginning. I am only too happy to wish for a clearer and thoroughly convincing argument the next ti! me.

Georges Bataille was a provocative thinker. Associated freely with the Surrealists, playing around with the fascists, Gnostics, psychoanalysis and eroticism, he managed to create a highly explosive cultural blend which proves influential in our times, like a real time-bomb should. Was he really that quasi-Postmodern thinker some interpreters try to make him look? Anyway, he wrote some of the most intellectually challenging texts and supplied exquisitely enjoyable concepts which present-day artists still can not truly exhaust. The book "Formless" provides an equally provocative reading of Bataille projected against some Modern and Postmodern artifacts, which the French thinker never really saw. It is anachronistic, it is puzzling, sometimes quite enjoyable. Problem is, it does not add to our understanding of neither Bataille, nor, for example, Andy Warhol. It shows that Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois can write complicated and intricate pieces on virtually anything, citing from Bataille and/or the so-called "French theory" to interesting effect. But this is not an art history book, it is rather a kind of artifact of its own right. Personally I do not regret that I bought it, but I can imagine people who would be disappointed.
I think in Thomas Pynchon's "V" there is a passage where two thugs planning to steal Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" from the Uffizi go to the museum and stare at the painting. They see a nude woman, a maid who is trying to cover her up with a cloak, and an excited male god at the left who is trying hard to blow the cloak away and keep Venus nude. Well, this does not add to our understanding of Botticelli, but provides amusing reading and serves Pynchon's point nicely. Something similar happens with "Formless": it is entertaining but tells us mostly about personal excitements and idiocyncrazies of the two intellegent people who wrote this collection.