The Inferno
1908
The Inferno
1908
Translated by Edward J. (Edward Joseph) O'Brien
A young man renting a cramped room in a Paris boarding house discovers a crack in the wall that opens onto the room beside his. What begins as idle curiosity becomes an obsession. Through this peephole, he witnesses the full arc of human life: first love's trembling kiss, the agony of childbirth, the slow devastations of illness, betrayal, and death. He is both voyeur and prophet, consuming these intimate moments while remaining utterly alone in his own grey room. Barbusse's 1908 novel is a fever dream of isolation and longing. The narrator is drowning in his own emptiness, yet the lives unfolding through that hole in the wall force him to confront something unbearable: that connection exists, that love and suffering happen, just inches away, and he cannot touch any of it. The prose surges with a nervous, sensual energy, all fragments and glimpses, accumulating into something devastating. This is a book about the unbearable distance between people, and the terrible hunger to bridge it. Radical for its time and still startling today, The Inferno dissects modern alienation with surgical precision. We are all the narrator, peering through the thin wall at lives we cannot enter.
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“It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.””
— Henri Barbusse
“All lovers in the world are alike: they fall in love by chance; they see each other, and are attached to each other by the features of their faces; they illuminate each other by the fierce preference which is akin to madness; they assert the reality of illusions; and for a moment they change falsehood into truth.””
— Henri Barbusse
“I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.””
— Henri Barbusse
“The memory of you saddened my joys, but consoled my sorrows.””
— Henri Barbusse
“I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall suffer because the past will never come back again.””
— Henri Barbusse
“At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.””
— Henri Barbusse
“The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr”
— Henri Barbusse
“It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive decisions and which is neither good not evil. It is by none of these things that one reaches happiness. One never reaches happiness.””
— Henri Barbusse
“How I waited for you! How I longed for you! he stammered. "I thought of you all the time. I saw you all the time. Your smile was everywhere." He lowered his voice and added, "Sometimes when people were talking commonplaces and your name happened to be mentioned, It would go through my heart like an electric current.””
— Henri Barbusse
