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adrianasturalvarez's review
5.0
"One day this world will pullulate in my dead mouth." - from Bataille's gravestone
I had only a vague idea of who Georges Bataille was before reading this highly recommended book. Something something naughty books... something something something provocative French intellectual... Well I have a much clearer picture now and I am so glad I trusted my intuition and dove into his fascinating life and work.
This is such a well written biography. In very readable prose, Surya balances stories and relationships from Bataille's life over time with a reasonable progression of his intellectual work and how one fed into the other. His life events are handled very well. There are no rosebuds here, no summing up, or getting to the bottom of the man, and yet I came away from this tome with a great sense of his ideas and influences and with more than enough context to tackle his oeuvre directly, which I am totally doing now.
It would be hard to recommend this book to anyone but hard not to recommend it to anyone with even a little bit of interest.
I had only a vague idea of who Georges Bataille was before reading this highly recommended book. Something something naughty books... something something something provocative French intellectual... Well I have a much clearer picture now and I am so glad I trusted my intuition and dove into his fascinating life and work.
This is such a well written biography. In very readable prose, Surya balances stories and relationships from Bataille's life over time with a reasonable progression of his intellectual work and how one fed into the other. His life events are handled very well. There are no rosebuds here, no summing up, or getting to the bottom of the man, and yet I came away from this tome with a great sense of his ideas and influences and with more than enough context to tackle his oeuvre directly, which I am totally doing now.
It would be hard to recommend this book to anyone but hard not to recommend it to anyone with even a little bit of interest.
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