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lee_foust's review against another edition
3.0
This is a very sweet--and bittersweet--novel of our hero Durtal's desperate desire to have done with evil and the tawdriness of Parisian literary life and convert to Catholicism wholly, coming as close to a medieval experience as the modern, fin-de-siecle world was probably willing to allow. To do so he visits a Trappist monastery for a few days and gains inspiration from the hardships that the monks face as an example of total medieval-style devotion. Yeah, that's about it. And it takes 300+ pages.
As a sequel to La Bas, En Route is something of an aesthetic failure. So much of what is fabulous and engrossing about La Bas is absent here--the dramatic juxtapositions of good and evil, modern and medieval, simple faith and backstabbing Parisian society, the terse and thoughtful dialogues and fascinatingly oddball characters of bell-ringer Des Hermies, cynical Dr. Johannes, and the mysterious and tortured Madame Chantelouve, as well as the stunning climaxes of Gilles de Rais's repentance and the scene of the Black mass that Durtal attends with the Satanic Chantelouve.
The action here, on the other hand, is all interior and revolves wholly around Durtal's struggle between his inclinations toward the shattering excesses of medieval spirituality and the cynical conformity of the literary bachelor's life to which he's become so accustomed. There have been great books of religious conversion--Augustine's Confessions springs to mind immediately, but--as En Route itself laments--those were other times, when such a story was fraught with drama. In a decadent culture so long accustomed to its tamed, mediocre, bourgeois, nonthreatening, and conformist Christianity, this is quite a lot of pages about a battle with almost no stakes and very little chance of success. And of course it's only the second of 5 novels recounting the story of Durtal's spiritual struggles. I had planned to read them all in sequence but I'm a bit hesitant now--despite the fact that I enjoyed this moderately--about pushing on to volume three. I missed the drama and the literary fireworks of La Bas!
As a sequel to La Bas, En Route is something of an aesthetic failure. So much of what is fabulous and engrossing about La Bas is absent here--the dramatic juxtapositions of good and evil, modern and medieval, simple faith and backstabbing Parisian society, the terse and thoughtful dialogues and fascinatingly oddball characters of bell-ringer Des Hermies, cynical Dr. Johannes, and the mysterious and tortured Madame Chantelouve, as well as the stunning climaxes of Gilles de Rais's repentance and the scene of the Black mass that Durtal attends with the Satanic Chantelouve.
The action here, on the other hand, is all interior and revolves wholly around Durtal's struggle between his inclinations toward the shattering excesses of medieval spirituality and the cynical conformity of the literary bachelor's life to which he's become so accustomed. There have been great books of religious conversion--Augustine's Confessions springs to mind immediately, but--as En Route itself laments--those were other times, when such a story was fraught with drama. In a decadent culture so long accustomed to its tamed, mediocre, bourgeois, nonthreatening, and conformist Christianity, this is quite a lot of pages about a battle with almost no stakes and very little chance of success. And of course it's only the second of 5 novels recounting the story of Durtal's spiritual struggles. I had planned to read them all in sequence but I'm a bit hesitant now--despite the fact that I enjoyed this moderately--about pushing on to volume three. I missed the drama and the literary fireworks of La Bas!
alemlire's review against another edition
4.0
Je ne sais pas comment j'ai pu ne pas m'ennuyer à lire les circonvolutions spirituelles du narrateur... Mais je ne me suis pas ennuyée. Du tout.
laughofmedusa's review against another edition
5.0
" L'art a complètement perdu la tête. Après avoir cherché ses types dans les régions de l'ombre, après avoir oublié que le soleil est sa patrie, après avoir tenté l'apothéose du mal, après avoir célébré de sa voix déshonorée le suicide et l'adultère, (…) il s'est écrié, dans la logique de son délire : le beau, c'est le laid ! » Ernest Hello. Auteur méconnu de tous - ou presque, par lequel je choisis d'aborder cette chronique, non pas que je sois en accord avec les propos sus-cités, mais parce qu'ils résument à eux seuls, le chemin qu'a accompli Huysmans de Là-bas à En route.
L'art, dans la définition qu'en fait Hello, celui dont « le caractère évident est la sérénité », a été pour Huys' son chemin menant vers Dieu, vers cet état d'insensibilité à la faute, de dormance aux choses de la vie. Il a tutoyé la grâce par le biais de l'art et rien d'autre ; notion clairement incarnée dans les diverses descriptions du plain-chant qui ont surchauffé les pages de ce livre - et ma rétine par la même occasion
L'art, dans la définition qu'en fait Hello, celui dont « le caractère évident est la sérénité », a été pour Huys' son chemin menant vers Dieu, vers cet état d'insensibilité à la faute, de dormance aux choses de la vie. Il a tutoyé la grâce par le biais de l'art et rien d'autre ; notion clairement incarnée dans les diverses descriptions du plain-chant qui ont surchauffé les pages de ce livre - et ma rétine par la même occasion