Alien Hearts
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Alien Hearts was the last book that Guy de Maupassant finished before his death at the early age of forty-three. It is the most original and psychologically penetrating of his several novels, and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. André Mariolle is a rich, handsome, gifted young man who cannot settle on what to do with himself. Madame de Burne, a glacially dazzling beauty, wants Mariolle to attend her exclusive salon for artists, composers, writers, and other intellectuals. At first Mariolle keeps his distance, but then he hits on the solution to all his problems: caring for nothing in particular, he will devote himself to being in love; Madame de Burne will be his everything. Soon lover and beloved are equally lost within a hall of mirrors of their common devising.
Richard Howard’s new English translation of this complex and brooding novel—the first in more than a hundred years—reveals the final, unexpected flowering of a great French realist’s art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eminent translator Howard gives a leavened, modern feel to Maupassant's weary tale of a young aristocratic loser infatuated with an on-the-rise Parisian salon hostess. Andr Mariolle, a rich, unmarried 37-year-old nobody, is introduced into the artistic salon of the wealthy young widow Madame Mich le de Burne and falls in love with the pretty hostess, a fiercely independent, utterly self-absorbed but intelligent coquette who is bent on attracting a cadre of slavish, brilliant admirers. A thoroughly "modern" woman, Madame de Burne encourages Andr 's advances only insofar as they proceed discreetly; however, Andr is head over heels. She gives herself to him but remains emotionally aloof, leading to Andr 's self-exile from Paris and his hiring of a comely girl as his domestic servant-cum-mistress in the wrong-headed hope of "curing" himself. Maupassant draws out Andre's tale of woe, a vehement meditation on feminine egotism, in dire speculations.
