Blue of Noon

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Blue of Noon (French: Le Bleu du Ciel) is a transgressive novella of erotic fiction written in 1935, and its French author, Georges Bataille was a committed anti-fascist, as can be seen from the content of this particular work. Harry Matthews translated it into English in 1978.

[edit] Plot summary

Henri Troppmann is living in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War of the mid-thirties, and its closing phases. He is torn between two different women. One of them, Lazare, is a Marxist Jew and political activist, who is preparing herself for prospective torture and martyrdom at the hand of General Francisco Franco's troops if she is captured. "Dirty" (or Dorothea) is an incontinent, unkempt alcoholic who repeatedly has sex with Troppmann. Troppmann has to choose between the abject Dirty and her associations of sex, disease, excrement and decay, and the politically engaged Lazare, and her ethical values of commitment, resistance and endurance. While looking at Lazare beneath a tree, Troppmann realises that he respects her for her social conscience, but also sees her as a rat, and chooses Dirty instead. The two copulate in a bone-strewn graveyard, and spy a group of Hitler Youth from Nazi Germany who appear to be visiting Spain. Troppmann and Dirty have a vision of the youth's fanaticism as prelude to their probable deaths on the future battlefields of World War II. However, both leave for Germany the next day.