Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in French literature and themes of war reflection
- Students studying Barbusse and early twentieth-century social-critical fiction
- Readers who like intellectually substantial, slow-reading long novels
- Researchers who need a public-domain English translation for textual comparison
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking light plots and fast-paced narrative
- Readers with low tolerance for translationese or long argumentative sentences
- Readers who only want battle scenes and action description
Reading tips
- Learn about Barbusse's life and historical background before entering the text to better grasp the direction of the arguments.
- Treat the title "Light" as a clue and note characters' different understandings of progress and enlightenment while reading.
- When encountering long passages of argument, mark them first and return after finishing a chapter to sort out differences between the author's and narrator's positions.
- If reading the English translation, compare it with the French original or reliable introductions, and note how the translation handles long sentences and modal particles.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
FAQ
Is Light a war novel?
Does reading the English translation lose the original style?
Is this book suitable as an introduction to Barbusse?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) was a French novelist, born in Asnières-sur-Seine and died in Moscow. During the First World War he served as an infantryman and, drawing on his firsthand trench experience, wrote Le feu (Under Fire: The Story of a Squad), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1916. With its nearly documentary style, the novel depicts soldiers' daily lives and the cruelty of war, and became an important work of war literature. He later turned to communism and pacifism, publishing novels such as The Inferno and Light, whose themes extend from individual experience to social criticism and idealistic striving. Five of his works are held in this collection, and he also wrote Meissonier. Public information on his early education and specific posts is limited, so no conjecture is offered here; his literary influence rests mainly on his war writing and his ideological turn.
