Like Death by Guy de Maupassant.
Guy de Maupassant places the successful painter Olivier Bertin at the center of a novel about love and its betrayals. Artistic achievement offers no simple protection from emotional vulnerability.
The interest lies in the distance between seeing clearly and understanding oneself. It makes a productive discussion of desire, self-deception and the limits of the stories through which people explain their attachments.
Edition notes: The cover represents the NYRB Classics paperback (ISBN 9781681370323). Apple Books offers the ebook (9781681370330). Both are translated from the French by Richard Howard.
