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Jerusalem
There are many books on the Holy Land, but not one that has in it anything such as Loti has put into this nor one that makes Christ seem so real, and yet the author professes to be an unbeliever. It has an extraordinary charm and fascination, and believers and unbelievers alike will appreciate it.
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First published January 1, 1894
About the author
Pierre Loti
436 books89 followersLouis Marie-Julien Viaud was a writer, who used the pseudonym Pierre Loti.
Viaud was born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, France, to an old Protestant family. His education began in Rochefort, but at the age of seventeen, being destined for the navy, he entered the naval school in Brest and studied on Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list.
His pseudonym has been said to be due to his extreme shyness and reserve in early life, which made his comrades call him after "le Loti", an Indian flower which loves to blush unseen. Other explanations have been put forth by scholars. It is also said that he got the name in Tahiti where he got a sun burn and was called Roti (because he was all red like a local flower), he couldn't pronounce the r well so he stuck with Loti. He was in the habit of claiming that he never read books (when he was received at the Académie française, he said, "Loti ne sait pas lire" ("Loti doesn't know how to read"), but testimony from friends and acquaintances proves otherwise, as does his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort. In 1876 fellow naval officers persuaded him to turn into a novel passages in his diary dealing with some curious experiences at Istanbul. The result was Aziyadé, a novel which, like so many of Loti's, is part romance, part autobiography, like the work of his admirer, Marcel Proust, after him. (There is a popular cafe in current-day Istanbul dedicated to the time Loti spent in Turkey.) He proceeded to the South Seas as part of his naval training, and several years after leaving Tahiti published the Polynesian idyll originally named Rarahu (1880), which was reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti, the first book to introduce him to the wider public. This was followed by Le Roman d'un spahi (1881), a record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegambia.
Loti on the day of his reception at the Académie française on 7 April, 1892. In 1882, Loti issued a collection of four shorter pieces, three stories and a travel piece, under the general title of Fleurs d'ennui (Flowers of Boredom).
In 1883 he entered the wider public spotlight. First, he publish the critically acclaimed Mon frere Yves (My Brother Yves), a novel describing the life of a French naval officer (Pierre Loti), and a Breton sailor (Yves Kermadec), described by Edmund Gosse as "one of his most characteristic productions".[1] Second, while taking part as a naval officer in the undeclared hostilities that preceded the outbreak of the Sino-French War (August 1884 to April 1885), Loti wrote an article in the newspaper Le Figaro about atrocities that occurred during the French bombardment of the Thuan An forts that guarded the approaches to Hue (August 1883), and was threatened with suspension from the service, thus gaining wider public notoriety.
In 1886 he published a novel of life among the Breton fisherfolk, called Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman), which Edmund Gosse characterized as "the most popular and finest of all his writings."[1] It shows Loti adapting some of the Impressionist techniques of contemporary painters, especially Monet, to prose, and is a classic of French literature. In 1887 he brought out a volume "of extraordinary merit, which has not received the attention it deserves",[1] Propos d'exil, a series of short studies of exotic places, in his characteristic semi-autobiographic style. The novel of Japanese manners, Madame Chrysanthème— a precursor to Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon and a work that is a combination of narrative and travelog— was published the same year.
During 1890 he published Au Maroc, the record of a journey to Fez in company with a French embassy, and Le Roman d'un enfant (The Story of a Child), a somewhat fictionalized recollection of Loti's childhood that would greatly influence Marcel Proust. A collection
Viaud was born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, France, to an old Protestant family. His education began in Rochefort, but at the age of seventeen, being destined for the navy, he entered the naval school in Brest and studied on Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910 he went on the reserve list.
His pseudonym has been said to be due to his extreme shyness and reserve in early life, which made his comrades call him after "le Loti", an Indian flower which loves to blush unseen. Other explanations have been put forth by scholars. It is also said that he got the name in Tahiti where he got a sun burn and was called Roti (because he was all red like a local flower), he couldn't pronounce the r well so he stuck with Loti. He was in the habit of claiming that he never read books (when he was received at the Académie française, he said, "Loti ne sait pas lire" ("Loti doesn't know how to read"), but testimony from friends and acquaintances proves otherwise, as does his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort. In 1876 fellow naval officers persuaded him to turn into a novel passages in his diary dealing with some curious experiences at Istanbul. The result was Aziyadé, a novel which, like so many of Loti's, is part romance, part autobiography, like the work of his admirer, Marcel Proust, after him. (There is a popular cafe in current-day Istanbul dedicated to the time Loti spent in Turkey.) He proceeded to the South Seas as part of his naval training, and several years after leaving Tahiti published the Polynesian idyll originally named Rarahu (1880), which was reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti, the first book to introduce him to the wider public. This was followed by Le Roman d'un spahi (1881), a record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegambia.
Loti on the day of his reception at the Académie française on 7 April, 1892. In 1882, Loti issued a collection of four shorter pieces, three stories and a travel piece, under the general title of Fleurs d'ennui (Flowers of Boredom).
In 1883 he entered the wider public spotlight. First, he publish the critically acclaimed Mon frere Yves (My Brother Yves), a novel describing the life of a French naval officer (Pierre Loti), and a Breton sailor (Yves Kermadec), described by Edmund Gosse as "one of his most characteristic productions".[1] Second, while taking part as a naval officer in the undeclared hostilities that preceded the outbreak of the Sino-French War (August 1884 to April 1885), Loti wrote an article in the newspaper Le Figaro about atrocities that occurred during the French bombardment of the Thuan An forts that guarded the approaches to Hue (August 1883), and was threatened with suspension from the service, thus gaining wider public notoriety.
In 1886 he published a novel of life among the Breton fisherfolk, called Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman), which Edmund Gosse characterized as "the most popular and finest of all his writings."[1] It shows Loti adapting some of the Impressionist techniques of contemporary painters, especially Monet, to prose, and is a classic of French literature. In 1887 he brought out a volume "of extraordinary merit, which has not received the attention it deserves",[1] Propos d'exil, a series of short studies of exotic places, in his characteristic semi-autobiographic style. The novel of Japanese manners, Madame Chrysanthème— a precursor to Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon and a work that is a combination of narrative and travelog— was published the same year.
During 1890 he published Au Maroc, the record of a journey to Fez in company with a French embassy, and Le Roman d'un enfant (The Story of a Child), a somewhat fictionalized recollection of Loti's childhood that would greatly influence Marcel Proust. A collection
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 17, 2026
Pierre Loti sailed into 1894 wearing a French officer's coat over a soul already unraveling at every seam, and his account of Jerusalem turns travelogue into confession, incense mingled with dust. He reached the city a captain of frigates and departed something closer to a mourner, kneeling among ruins his own faith could barely survive.
The prose piles stone upon stone the way old Jerusalem does, layer after layer of empire and devotion pressed flat beneath centuries of sandals.
Loti walks the Via Dolorosa and his sentences blister along with him, dragging every comma like a station of grief. Gethsemane sweats its ancient agony onto the page, and an agnostic sailor sweats beside it, present in body though belief remains elsewhere. The Mount of Olives offers its branch to a faith beyond his reach, and he takes the shade instead, grateful for cover over salvation.
At the Wailing Wall his sympathy turns into something uglier. He watches Jewish pilgrims press their foreheads to stone worn smooth by centuries of sorrow, and instead of communion he records disgust, confessing fear where compassion belonged.
The passage dates the book more surely than any costume or camel does, a period prejudice pressed into permanent print alongside cypress and minaret. A century on, the wall still stands, sturdier than the sentence written against those who wept beside it.
For all his doubt, or maybe because of it, Loti built a monument out of melancholy sturdy enough to outlast a century of readers. His Jerusalem mourns a world he believed was closing, and sorrow, it turns out, ages better than certainty. Every domed alley and blackened lamp receives its dirge, every hush its own psalm, the whole book an heirloom of ache, offered freely to readers centuries later.
Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was the pen name of Julien Viaud, a French naval officer and novelist known for exotic, melancholic travel writing set in the ports and lands he visited on duty (Turkey, Tahiti, Japan, Senegal, and more). He was a prominent literary figure of his time, elected to the Académie Française in 1891, and famous for a lush, sensory prose style tinged with pessimism about the modern world and his own lost faith.
In 1894 he traveled to Ottoman Eretz Israel as part of a personal pilgrimage, prompted by curiosity about his own spiritual doubt. Loti had lost his childhood Catholic faith, and the trip to Jerusalem functioned as an attempt to confront that loss directly, standing in the places central to Christian belief to see what, if anything, still moved him. The resulting book (Jérusalem, 1895) reads as much as a record of that inner crisis as a portrait of the city itself.
Loti closed his book convinced Zion belonged only to legend, a hope permanently retired to memory. History answered in stone. Fifty-three years after his pilgrimage, a sovereign state rose on the ground he mourned, and prayer at that same wall turned from supplication into ownership.
Every wall he named a haunt became a rampart guarding a nation instead of an echo. Dust he pitied learned masonry. Jerusalem, once his elegy, drafted its own rebuttal, brick by patient brick, ancient stone answering doubt with deed. Zion, unbound from mourning, stands home at last, wholly and holy, a pilgrimage completed by return.
”...And what a darksome abyss is there disclosed. An abyss of a very special and peculiar kind, which before this morning I had never seen, but which I nevertheless recognise at once: the Valley of Jehoshaphat!
Looking down through the narrow loophole I contemplate it with a shudder. Right at the bottom, in its deepest folds, is the dried-up bed of the Kidron. On the opposite slope are those things, of an aspect and a sadness unique in the world, which are known as the tombs of Absalom and Jehoshaphat. And all about, in a silence as mournful as that in which we stand, in a solitude that is a continuation of the solitude of this holy enclosure, is the valley filled with the dead. Tombs and tombs, an infinity of tombs, a scattering of similar stones as innumerable as the pebbles of the sea-shore and with such an appearance of abandonment, of definitive oblivion, that it seems impossible that a resurrection should ever come to open them. The whole place, this morning, under its ephemeral covering of grass and flowers, bears witness mournfully to the irrevocableness of death and the triumph of dust....”
❤️ 🇮🇱
The prose piles stone upon stone the way old Jerusalem does, layer after layer of empire and devotion pressed flat beneath centuries of sandals.
Loti walks the Via Dolorosa and his sentences blister along with him, dragging every comma like a station of grief. Gethsemane sweats its ancient agony onto the page, and an agnostic sailor sweats beside it, present in body though belief remains elsewhere. The Mount of Olives offers its branch to a faith beyond his reach, and he takes the shade instead, grateful for cover over salvation.
At the Wailing Wall his sympathy turns into something uglier. He watches Jewish pilgrims press their foreheads to stone worn smooth by centuries of sorrow, and instead of communion he records disgust, confessing fear where compassion belonged.
The passage dates the book more surely than any costume or camel does, a period prejudice pressed into permanent print alongside cypress and minaret. A century on, the wall still stands, sturdier than the sentence written against those who wept beside it.
For all his doubt, or maybe because of it, Loti built a monument out of melancholy sturdy enough to outlast a century of readers. His Jerusalem mourns a world he believed was closing, and sorrow, it turns out, ages better than certainty. Every domed alley and blackened lamp receives its dirge, every hush its own psalm, the whole book an heirloom of ache, offered freely to readers centuries later.
Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was the pen name of Julien Viaud, a French naval officer and novelist known for exotic, melancholic travel writing set in the ports and lands he visited on duty (Turkey, Tahiti, Japan, Senegal, and more). He was a prominent literary figure of his time, elected to the Académie Française in 1891, and famous for a lush, sensory prose style tinged with pessimism about the modern world and his own lost faith.
In 1894 he traveled to Ottoman Eretz Israel as part of a personal pilgrimage, prompted by curiosity about his own spiritual doubt. Loti had lost his childhood Catholic faith, and the trip to Jerusalem functioned as an attempt to confront that loss directly, standing in the places central to Christian belief to see what, if anything, still moved him. The resulting book (Jérusalem, 1895) reads as much as a record of that inner crisis as a portrait of the city itself.
Loti closed his book convinced Zion belonged only to legend, a hope permanently retired to memory. History answered in stone. Fifty-three years after his pilgrimage, a sovereign state rose on the ground he mourned, and prayer at that same wall turned from supplication into ownership.
Every wall he named a haunt became a rampart guarding a nation instead of an echo. Dust he pitied learned masonry. Jerusalem, once his elegy, drafted its own rebuttal, brick by patient brick, ancient stone answering doubt with deed. Zion, unbound from mourning, stands home at last, wholly and holy, a pilgrimage completed by return.
”...And what a darksome abyss is there disclosed. An abyss of a very special and peculiar kind, which before this morning I had never seen, but which I nevertheless recognise at once: the Valley of Jehoshaphat!
Looking down through the narrow loophole I contemplate it with a shudder. Right at the bottom, in its deepest folds, is the dried-up bed of the Kidron. On the opposite slope are those things, of an aspect and a sadness unique in the world, which are known as the tombs of Absalom and Jehoshaphat. And all about, in a silence as mournful as that in which we stand, in a solitude that is a continuation of the solitude of this holy enclosure, is the valley filled with the dead. Tombs and tombs, an infinity of tombs, a scattering of similar stones as innumerable as the pebbles of the sea-shore and with such an appearance of abandonment, of definitive oblivion, that it seems impossible that a resurrection should ever come to open them. The whole place, this morning, under its ephemeral covering of grass and flowers, bears witness mournfully to the irrevocableness of death and the triumph of dust....”
❤️ 🇮🇱
June 3, 2024
Excelente!!!!
September 2, 2014
dramatic & striking descriptions of holy sites, esp. of haram sharif and Mary's tomb. very interesting musings on loti's Christian faith. some facts are wrong. for ex. he does not seem to grasp that local Christians are arab natives -palestinians- not converts or foreigners. tone perpetually in grips of depressing disappointment before the real sites rather than fantasy biblical images he expects. typical syndrome of holy land voyagers: seeing the contemporary through the glasses of myth and orientalism. Overall very interesting anyway
November 6, 2024
Hoy traigo un libro de otra época, con una prosa diferente, que pertenece a un género que tuvo bastante relevancia a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX: la literatura de viajes. En esa época, esta era una manera en la que la gente podía explorar el ancho mundo cuando los viajes eran cosa de pocos.
Este libro, escrito por uno de los máximos exponentes de este género en el siglo XIX, Pierre Loti, forma parte de la llamada Trilogía de Tierra Santa. El autor se concentra en su viaje a Jerusalén, cubriendo desde los días anteriores a su llegada hasta que parte para continuar su viaje hacia Damasco.
Escrito en un estilo bastante diferente al que tendría ahora un libro de viajes, es evidente que la fotografía todavía no estaba generalizada y mucho menos las artes visuales como el cine. Las descripciones que en todo momento realiza generan en la mente del lector vívidas imágenes de lo que el autor estaba viviendo, muchas veces acompañadas por todos los sonidos que percibía. En este aspecto, es un libro meticuloso, de otro tiempo, que buscaba llevar tierras lejanas y desconocidas al lector de su época.
Por otra parte, el libro está imbuido de mucha religiosidad y mística. El autor, de origen cristiano calvinista, experimenta una importante crisis de fe y espera que el viaje a Jerusalén le sirva para encontrar la fe primitiva. En todo momento, estos dilemas espirituales están presentes en sus pensamientos.
A medida que el libro avanza, deja un poco de lado la narrativa de viajes para centrarse más en sus pensamientos y dilemas, concluyendo que en Jerusalén no encuentra la fe primigenia que buscaba. Le abruman todas las riquezas, las imágenes y los ritos orientales, muy alejados del calvinismo de su niñez.
El retrato de la ciudad y de sus gentes es bastante desolador: una ciudad llena de ruinas, de pobreza, de mendigos y de centenares de peregrinos pobres que van a visitar los lugares santos. Los árabes y los beduinos le causan simpatía y emoción. En cambio, el retrato de los judíos es digno de cualquier libro de la Edad Media, donde solo ve la maldad y la usura, y hasta en los niños ve la culpabilidad de la muerte de Cristo.
En cuanto a la escritura, para generar todas estas imágenes, el autor se apoya en muchas figuras retóricas, símiles, metáforas, elipsis, enumeraciones y personificaciones, para citar algunas de las que se pueden encontrar, lo que convierte la narración en un texto muy rico literariamente en algunos momentos.
Como curiosidad, cabe mencionar la incomodidad que le generaba ver a los primeros turistas de agencia, que empezaban a aparecer por aquellas épocas y que, para el autor, ensuciaban la imagen de la ciudad y de los santos lugares. Si levantara la cabeza actualmente y viera cualquier ciudad importante, probablemente se escandalizaría.
En conclusión, un libro que al inicio me pareció interesante por sus descripciones casi cinematográficas, pero que a medida que avanza se hace repetitivo, y al final sus meditaciones en torno a su debilitada fe resultan un poco pesadas.
Este libro, escrito por uno de los máximos exponentes de este género en el siglo XIX, Pierre Loti, forma parte de la llamada Trilogía de Tierra Santa. El autor se concentra en su viaje a Jerusalén, cubriendo desde los días anteriores a su llegada hasta que parte para continuar su viaje hacia Damasco.
Escrito en un estilo bastante diferente al que tendría ahora un libro de viajes, es evidente que la fotografía todavía no estaba generalizada y mucho menos las artes visuales como el cine. Las descripciones que en todo momento realiza generan en la mente del lector vívidas imágenes de lo que el autor estaba viviendo, muchas veces acompañadas por todos los sonidos que percibía. En este aspecto, es un libro meticuloso, de otro tiempo, que buscaba llevar tierras lejanas y desconocidas al lector de su época.
Por otra parte, el libro está imbuido de mucha religiosidad y mística. El autor, de origen cristiano calvinista, experimenta una importante crisis de fe y espera que el viaje a Jerusalén le sirva para encontrar la fe primitiva. En todo momento, estos dilemas espirituales están presentes en sus pensamientos.
A medida que el libro avanza, deja un poco de lado la narrativa de viajes para centrarse más en sus pensamientos y dilemas, concluyendo que en Jerusalén no encuentra la fe primigenia que buscaba. Le abruman todas las riquezas, las imágenes y los ritos orientales, muy alejados del calvinismo de su niñez.
El retrato de la ciudad y de sus gentes es bastante desolador: una ciudad llena de ruinas, de pobreza, de mendigos y de centenares de peregrinos pobres que van a visitar los lugares santos. Los árabes y los beduinos le causan simpatía y emoción. En cambio, el retrato de los judíos es digno de cualquier libro de la Edad Media, donde solo ve la maldad y la usura, y hasta en los niños ve la culpabilidad de la muerte de Cristo.
En cuanto a la escritura, para generar todas estas imágenes, el autor se apoya en muchas figuras retóricas, símiles, metáforas, elipsis, enumeraciones y personificaciones, para citar algunas de las que se pueden encontrar, lo que convierte la narración en un texto muy rico literariamente en algunos momentos.
Como curiosidad, cabe mencionar la incomodidad que le generaba ver a los primeros turistas de agencia, que empezaban a aparecer por aquellas épocas y que, para el autor, ensuciaban la imagen de la ciudad y de los santos lugares. Si levantara la cabeza actualmente y viera cualquier ciudad importante, probablemente se escandalizaría.
En conclusión, un libro que al inicio me pareció interesante por sus descripciones casi cinematográficas, pero que a medida que avanza se hace repetitivo, y al final sus meditaciones en torno a su debilitada fe resultan un poco pesadas.
April 8, 2019
Difficile en 2019 d'encaisser les épithètes de Loti pour décrire les Juifs et les dévots chrétiens. Même si l'époque était à l'antisémitisme bon teint des chrétiens envers ceux qui ont "tué le Christ" (Au bout de 20 siècles, fallait peut-être passer à autre chose, plus personne n'était coupable depuis longtemps), on sait ce qu'il est advenu. Et d'ailleurs elle était déjà pleine de pogroms qui aurait pu lui inspirer plus de pitié et d'humanité, l'époque. Dans un cas il est franchement antisémite, "sordide" et "sournois" étant tout ce que lui inspire la vue des uns, dans l'autre il se montre plein de suffisance, sauf en fin de récit où il admet un peu plus d'humilité, in extremis...
Et ses aigreurs de déçu parce que les églises, les rues et son pays sont pleins d'"horreurs" (encore un terme qu'il utilise plusieurs fois, ce petit délicat) ou d'"effroi", et la hauteur qu'il prend pour la juger, finissent par franchement énerver, à la longue : Jérusalem ne lui doit rien, ni à personne. Elle est toujours debout après avoir été si sauvagement violentée par tous. En soi c'est un exploit. C'est l'un des endroits au monde où même sans être croyant on sent le poids des siècles et d'une forme d'adoration barbare presque magique, qui ne convertit pas un athée mais fascine par ce qu'elle a de primitif et d'ancien. La "foi" de Loti ressemble plus à un vague mais profond souvenir d'enfance enfoui qu'il est bien incapable de décrire parce qu'il n'y a plus que là qu'il existe, lui même étant devenu presque étranger à ce souvenir. Alors quoi ? C'est un petit garçon capricieux et déprimé qui fait sa crise de déception mystique. Son Christ lui manque mais son Christ est sa création personnelle, et assez floue. Sa tristesse est celle d'un dépressif qui attend l'heure de prendre un antidépresseur au Gethsemani, mais le médicament n'a pas l'effet escompté.
Quand il lâche son pathos pour nous faire déambuler à ses côtés dans les rues et surtout dans les lieux saints, on arrive à ressentir autre chose que de l'exaspération pour cette pauvre petite créature. De la douceur, et de l'apaisement, voire même de la féerie. Il y met toujours beaucoup de poésie et de beauté, à décrire les faïences et les nacres, la grâce des édifices où l'on se résigne, où riches et surtout très pauvres pleurent et puisent de l'espoir dans leur solitude.
La fin est un peu nébuleuse. Encore des larmes sur Jésus, et la conclusion que sans lui, il n'y a rien. Sans Jésus, pas d'amour. Quelle ouverture d'esprit.
Contente d'avoir fini. Mais maintenant j'ai peur de lire ce qu'il a pensé des Hindous, des Japonais et des Chinois.
Et ses aigreurs de déçu parce que les églises, les rues et son pays sont pleins d'"horreurs" (encore un terme qu'il utilise plusieurs fois, ce petit délicat) ou d'"effroi", et la hauteur qu'il prend pour la juger, finissent par franchement énerver, à la longue : Jérusalem ne lui doit rien, ni à personne. Elle est toujours debout après avoir été si sauvagement violentée par tous. En soi c'est un exploit. C'est l'un des endroits au monde où même sans être croyant on sent le poids des siècles et d'une forme d'adoration barbare presque magique, qui ne convertit pas un athée mais fascine par ce qu'elle a de primitif et d'ancien. La "foi" de Loti ressemble plus à un vague mais profond souvenir d'enfance enfoui qu'il est bien incapable de décrire parce qu'il n'y a plus que là qu'il existe, lui même étant devenu presque étranger à ce souvenir. Alors quoi ? C'est un petit garçon capricieux et déprimé qui fait sa crise de déception mystique. Son Christ lui manque mais son Christ est sa création personnelle, et assez floue. Sa tristesse est celle d'un dépressif qui attend l'heure de prendre un antidépresseur au Gethsemani, mais le médicament n'a pas l'effet escompté.
Quand il lâche son pathos pour nous faire déambuler à ses côtés dans les rues et surtout dans les lieux saints, on arrive à ressentir autre chose que de l'exaspération pour cette pauvre petite créature. De la douceur, et de l'apaisement, voire même de la féerie. Il y met toujours beaucoup de poésie et de beauté, à décrire les faïences et les nacres, la grâce des édifices où l'on se résigne, où riches et surtout très pauvres pleurent et puisent de l'espoir dans leur solitude.
La fin est un peu nébuleuse. Encore des larmes sur Jésus, et la conclusion que sans lui, il n'y a rien. Sans Jésus, pas d'amour. Quelle ouverture d'esprit.
Contente d'avoir fini. Mais maintenant j'ai peur de lire ce qu'il a pensé des Hindous, des Japonais et des Chinois.
June 28, 2019
Libro di viaggio esotico, per allora. Chi ha viaggiato in quei luoghi adesso può leggerne una descrizione di oltre 100 anni fa, completamente diversa dall'attuale. loti poi è sempre un amante dell'esotismo e di un romanticismo decadente fin de siècle: fra ateismo e cristianesimo romantico vissuto personalmente, vuol passare una notte al Getsemani - dove non c'erano ancora le chiese attuali- arra vana ricerca di non so che esperienza mistica. le strade si percorrevano solo a cavallo, lui e i suoi si vestivano da arabi magrebini, visita misteriosi tesori delle chiese di cui non ho sentito mai più parlare, si emoziona al S Sepolcro, disprezza i pochi ebrei presenti, vede tanti pellegrini russi.. il tutto in un bel linguaggio scorrevole.
April 29, 2021
Loti est plus inspiré au désert, à Tahiti ou dans les souks d'Istanbul que dans les rues de la cité trois fois sainte. Une recherche de la foi perdue qui finit sur un embryon de succès. Un récit où transpire sans fard l'antisémitisme affiché comme presque naturel de la société européenne des XIXe et début XXe siècle
December 13, 2024
Fascinant. Pierre Loti a Jerusalem, finals del segle XIX. En plena crisi de fe, viatja a Terra Santa amb l'esperança de trobar i trobar-se, de nou en el camí de Crist.
El llibre és una finestra a un món que ja no existeix. Mentre busca respostes i filosofa sobre la religió, ens explica els costums, la vida als pobles i la ciutat Santa, i detalls, explicats amb molt estil.
Recomanable lectura.
El llibre és una finestra a un món que ja no existeix. Mentre busca respostes i filosofa sobre la religió, ens explica els costums, la vida als pobles i la ciutat Santa, i detalls, explicats amb molt estil.
Recomanable lectura.
August 29, 2022
Vivid description of this unique city and the numerous faiths that have an important place there, something that is no longer the case today.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews