Abbé Jules by Octave Mirbeau


Abbé Jules
Title : Abbé Jules
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1873982372
ISBN-10 : 9781873982372
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 232
Publication : First published January 1, 1888

Part two of Octave Mirbeau's autobiographical trilogy, ABBE JULES tells of a priest's lifelong struggle with his passions. With the realism of Zola and the decadent vision of D'Aurevilly, and reflecting the impressionism of Monet, Pissaro and Van Gogh, Mirbeau's novel presents us with a small boy's vision of provincial France, where family, education and religion conspire to produce a petit bourgeois tortured by repressed desire, violent fantasies, and forbidden lusts.

Abbé Jules Reviews

  • Matthew

    Excellent character study of a neurotic Catholic priest. Abbé Jules is a tragic figure that seems to have been destined for suffering, "I sense that there are things in me which are suffocating me and cannot come out" (pg. 136).

    By the end of the novel you'll be decrying his bourgeois family and church establishment as well, calling them "imbeciles" as the main character is so fond of saying.

    "I had organs and they made me think in Greek, Latin, and French that it was shameful to use them. They twisted my intelligence as they did my body and in the place of the natural, instinctive man, full of life, they substituted an artificial puppet, a mechanical doll of civilisation, with an ideal breathed into it ... the ideal from which are born Bankers, priests, cheats, debauches, assassins and the unhappy" (pg. 182).

    "I told you God is an illusion. Well, I don't know. I don't know anything, for the consequence of our education and the result of our studies is to teach us to know nothing and doubt everything. There may be a God, there may be several. I don't know" (pg. 182).

  • K.

    lancing a boil