The Misted Mirror

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Very Good+ in Good dj. 1931. First American Edition. Hardcover. [light external soiling and a bit of wear to extremities; jacket has several small chips along top and bottom edges, browned at spine, several tears that are internally tape-repaired]. Novel about a young man and his travails as part of that generation in France who came of age in the decade following World War I -- a "generation which, not old enough by a few years to have taken part in the War, suffered all the spiritual, mental and moral strain of that time." The New York Times critic was unimpressed, likening its protagonist to Julien Sorel (of "The Red and the Black"), deriding him as "one of those thin, dark-eyed, sensitive young men who have been the recurrent concern of French novelists since Stendahl." The book itself, he stated, was "hesitant and groping. There is no plot. There are merely a series of incidents, [which] all go to show the culmination of doubt and spiritual distress in his heart." This was the author's first novel, published in France in 1928 as "L'âme obscure" (which translates as "The Dark Soul"); he had begun his literary career with a 1926 essay entitled "Notre inquiétude" ("Our Anxiety"), which took as its theme "humanity's loss of meaning and direction in an increasingly industrialized and mechanized world" (Wikipedia). Raised a Roman Catholic, he had returned to the religion after a period of agnosticism in the 1920s, and from the early 1930s onward most of his writings concerned Catholicism. .