"Casting Octave Mirbeau as a fierce detractor of army, church, and schools--institutions of regimentation and repression that perverted man's instinct and alienated him from nature--critics and literary historians see his fiction as grounded in the sordid social reality of his time. Yet unlike his reactionary contemporaries who sought escape into the narcissistic bliss of mysticism (J.-K. Huysmans) or admission into the exclusive precincts of occult research (Joséphin Péladan), Mirbeau pursued experiences of the transcendental in order to better understand his suffering brothers whose plight he chronicles in his work" --