Hell

<p><I>Hell</I> (1908) is a novel by Henri Barbusse. Immensely popular upon its publication in France Hell earned Barbusse a reputation as a leading realist whose existential preoccupations predate the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre by several decades. His portrait of ennui isolation and urban life remains both stylistically and thematically fresh over a century after it appeared in print. A whole world of human beings had passed here like smoke leaving nothing white but the window. And I? I am a man like every other man just as that evening was like every other evening. In this claustrophobic lyric novel an unnamed narrator moves into a rundown apartment in Paris. There he grows increasingly isolated from the world outside turning instead to the lives of his many neighbors. Through the thin walls which contain a hidden peephole he listens and watches as strangers conduct the secret dramas of their daily lives. Witnessing acts of adultery lesbianism incest theft and abuse he grows increasingly dependent on the adrenaline rush of voyeurism withdrawing further and further from the life of the bustling city. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript this edition of Henri Barbusse's <I>Hell</I> is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.</p>