Written in French in 1887–88, Swedish author August Strindberg's novel
Le Plaidoyer d'un fou (Confession of a Fool) was first published in an 1893 German translation and subsequently released in a manicured French version in 1895. The German version was taken to court on indecency charges in Vilhelmine Berlin, the French version became a scandal, and Strindberg never authorized the novel for publication in Sweden.
Although
Le Plaidoyer d'un fou helped cement Strindberg's reputation at home and abroad as a paranoid misogynist, it also provides a complementary trajectory for understanding the emergence of European transnational prose modernism. In its conception, publication, and reception,
Le Plaidoyer d'un fou straddles both national and linguistic borders; its plot involves travel trajectories that link Sweden with the continent, and Stockholm with Paris. This novel tells a story of adultery, divorce, and lesbian desire, while tracing, through a first-person voice, the narrator's professed descent into madness.
This is the 1895 French edition. It was extracted from a Swedish literature PD text site.
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