page_title: Dans le ciel
section_title: Plot summary
hierarchical_section_title: Dans le ciel / Plot summary
context_page_description: Dans le ciel is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau. First published in serialized installments in L'Écho de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Dans le ciel, assembled and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, first appeared its present form in 1989.
  English translation: In the Sky, Nine-Banded Books, Charleston, 2015. Translation: Ann Sterzinger. Introduction: Claire Nettleton.
context_section_description: Inspired by the art of the Impressionists – using Claude Monet and, mainly, Vincent van Gogh as models for its central characters –, Dans le ciel conveys the author's growing conviction that the only worthwhile art communicated its striving for the incommunicable and that the finished work could express no more than the frustration of its goals.
  A series of interlocking narratives, the novel begins by relating the creative failures of the self-styled novelist Georges, who produces nothing but an unfinished autobiography, then chronicles the poignant struggles of the painter Lucien, whose inability to complete his masterpiece culminates with his suicide when he severs his own hand. It is with the discovery of the terrible fate of the self-mutilating artist that Mirbeau's truncated narrative is itself left in suspension.
caption: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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