Les Vingt Et Un Jours D'un Neurasthénique
''Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique'' is an expressionist novel by the French writer Octave Mirbeau, published by Charpentier-Fasquelle in August 1901. Commentary It's a collage of fifty cruel tales already published in the press over the previous fifteen years. So Mirbeau unsettles traditional novelistic conventions, transgressing the code of fictional credibility and maintaining indeterminacy of its genre affiliation. A fictionalized rendering of the author’s sojourn a few years before at the Pyrenean spa of Luchon, the novel mirrors a vagrant plot in its episodic narrative. Mirbeau’s narrator, Georges Vasseur, moves from observation to recollection, traveling from sanitarium to insane asylum and finally to the desolate mountain retreat of a misanthropic friend, who propounds his philosophy of nihilism and decries the futility of art. In his peripatetic narrative, Mirbeau casts a glaring light on the defective human animal, who tries to compensate for his s ...
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