Disagreeable Tales


Disagreeable Tales is an 1894 short story collection by the French writer Léon Bloy. It consists of thirty tales set in Paris, focusing on criminality, perversions, and other subject matters typical of the Decadent movement. The common theme is the faith in God in a time of human spiritual crisis.
The book is dedicated "To my dear friend Eugène Borrel, in devout remembrance of Our Lady of Ephesus, who places us so far away from contemporary garbage."

Stories

The English titles listed here are from the Wakefield Press edition. An edition held by the Bibliothèque nationale appears to contain two additional stories, "L'appel du Gouffre" and "L'Ami des Bêtes", though they are in fact excerpts from Bloy's novel The Woman Who Was Poor. Both pieces appear in the Snuggly Books edition.
Nearly all the stories in Histoires désobligeantes were originally published in Gil Blas; the date given after the French title refers to the issue in which the work first appeared.
  1. "Herbal Tea"
  2. "The Old Man of the House"
  3. "The Religion of Monsieur Pleur"
  4. "The Parlor of Tarantulas"
  5. "Draft for a Funeral Oration"
  6. "The Prisoners of Longjumeau"
  7. "A Lousy Idea" Four young men decide to live together, but when one of them marries, the other three continually harangue him for intimate details of his relations with his new wife, until she is finally driven into the arms of a lover and makes her escape.
  8. "Two Ghosts"
  9. "A Dentist's Terrible Punishment" A dentist murders a love rival, but after marrying the woman he killed for, he fathers a child with her only to discover that it resembles his victim, and so he strangles the baby.
  10. "The Awakening of Alain Chartier"
  11. "The Stroker of Compassion"
  12. "Monsieur's Past"
  13. "Whatever You Want!" Making his way home after a night of pleasure, a man encounters a prostitute who may be his sister.
  14. "Well-Done" The son of a retired, well-to-do coffin bleacher ends up accidentally cremating his father before he is dead.
  15. "The End of Don Juan" During the reign of Louis Philippe, the handsome Hector de la Tour de Pise sires hideously misshapen children, and in his old age licks the feet of a prostitute.
  16. "A Martyr"
  17. "Suspicion"
  18. "The Telephone of Calypso"
  19. "A Recruit"
  20. "Botched Sacrilege"
  21. "It's Gonna Blow!" A discussion about the forgivableness of the human soul degenerates into a confession of murder and arson.
  22. "The Silver Lining"
  23. "A Well-Fed Man"
  24. "The Lucky Bean"
  25. "Digestive Aids"
  26. "The Reading Room"
  27. "Nobody's Perfect"
  28. "Let's Be Reasonable!"
  29. "Jocasta on the Streets"
  30. "Cain's Luckiest Fine"

English translations

Histoires Désobligeantes has been translated into English twice, first by Erik Butler for Wakefield Press in 2015, and then by Brian Stableford, with an introduction and footnotes, as The Tarantula's Parlor and Other Unkind Tales for Snuggly Books in 2016.

Reception

Erik Morse wrote for The Paris Review in 2015, "What distinguishes Bloy's 'tales' from those written by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Poe, and Lautréamont is the marked absence of any sensualist or proto-surrealist tone with its ecstatic invocations of the flesh, like those that characterize Romantic literature since William Blake. Rather, Bloy's bilious allusions to excrement, genitalia, rot, disease, and waste descend from a negative theology, which extols a mystical, self-mortification... For Bloy, all physical pleasures are diversion or, worst yet, satanic temptation, so it is only through intense suffering and punishment that his characters can expiate their sins."
The Complete Review and The ''Pan Review'' both praise Butler's translation.