Like Death
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A devastating novel about the treachery of love by Maupassant, now in a new translation by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet and translator Richard Howard
Olivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name as a young man with his Cleopatra, he has gone on to establish himself as “the chosen painter of Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls.” And though his hair may be white, he remains a handsome, vigorous, and engaging bachelor, a prized guest at every table and salon.
Olivier’s lover is Anne, the Countess de Guilleroy, the wife of a busy politician. Their relationship is long-standing, close, almost conjugal. The countess’s daughter is Annette, and she is the spitting image of her mother in her lovely youth. Having finished her schooling, Annette is returning to Paris. Her parents have put together an excellent match. Everything is as it should be—until the painter and countess are each seized by an agonizing suspicion, like death. . . . In its devastating depiction of the treacherous nature of love, Like Death is more than the equal of Swann’s Way. Richard Howard’s new translation brings out all the penetration and poetry of this masterpiece of nineteenth-century fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slim novel, Maupassant takes as his subject a long affair and its slow burn of love and jealousy. Feted artist Olivier Bertin, "the chosen painter of Parisiennes," enjoyed a career of enduring success; "Fortune led him to the threshold of old age, petting and caressing him all the way." The painter's affair with Anne de Guilleroy, wife of a "Norman Squire," begins when he first sees her dressed in mourning, and he takes her as his muse, inviting her to sit for a painting. The novel charts the early euphoric stage of their love, when "he went to bed early, still vibrating with happiness," through the long plateau of amiti amoureuse. However, as Anna and her daughter enter a party one night, the painter observes that Anna is "like a flower in full bloom" while her 18-year-old daughter, Annette, is "just blossoming." Olivier becomes torn between his affection for the two, and his love becomes complicated, "feeling for the mother his revived passion and covering the daughter with an obscure tenderness." Anna, aware of her lover's increasing ambivalence, becomes tormented and sickened with jealousy of her daughter as well as becoming aware of her own aging, while Annette remains blissfully innocent and oblivious to the amorous drama. Though the novel has its quaint charms, its Freudian love triangle often feels heavy-handed and its characters flat. The novel builds to a dramatic yet predictable climax, lacking the freshness of Maupassant's best work.
