page_title: La 628-E8
section_title: Commentary
hierarchical_section_title: La 628-E8 / Commentary
caption_attribution_description: CGV 1902
context_page_description: La 628-E8 is a novel by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, published by Fasquelle in 1907. Part travelogue, part fantasy, part cultural commentary and critique, Mirbeau's book highlights its own unclassifiability: "Is it a diary?”, the narrator wonders. "Is it even the account of a trip?”
context_section_description: To Mirbeau, the automobile represents an ideal instrument for combatting ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The novel’s most electrifying descriptions recreate in readers the speeding motorist’s dazed disorientation as the missile of his vehicle carries him past epileptic telegraph poles and blurred animals along the roadside.
  In an incongruous final section underscoring the novel’s fractured structure, Mirbeau appends a scandalous account of La Mort de Balzac (The Death of Balzac), relating the author’s death agonies while, in an adjoining room, his wife, Mme Hanska, engaged in sexual frolicking with painter Jean Gigoux. One can only surmise the controversial episode constituted another instance of the kind of iconoclastic writing that Mirbeau was inclined to engage in.
  An English translation, not complete, has been published : Sketches of a journey, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard.
caption: Charron C.G.V., 1902
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