In the Sky | Octave Mirbeau

Freed from words and images, released from books which sleep, spellbound, on library shelves, artistic inspiration remains, in Mirbeau’s novel, on the level of pain that cannot be voiced in words. –Robert Ziegler Octave Mirbeau would soon rankle bourgeois sensibilities with such fin-de-siècle literary provocations as The Torture Garden (1899) and Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), but in 1892 the French anarchist and litterateur signaled the arrival of modernism with Dans le ciel (In the Sky), an emotionally arresting fictional portrait of a reclusive painter tragically undone by the vaulting, annihilative power of his own ineffable vision. Informed by the author’s active engagement with the late nineteenth-century avant garde, this obscure novel illuminates the Impressionist milieu while presenting a timeless meditation on the bond of friendship and the volatile communion between madness and art. Originally serialized in the French literary journal L’Echo de Paris between September