Like Death

Richard Howard's elegant translation of Like Death has the cool exactitude and passionate interplay of characters that readers expect from Guy de Maupassant, whose 1889 novel tells with ironic detachment and killing specificity the story of a portrait painter's great love.

Olivier Bertin is still handsome, though white-haired, and for 12 years has been the lover of Anne, the Countess of Guilleroy. But Anne's daughter comes home from school as a ravishing reincarnation of her mother, and the Countess is painfully aware that her own beauty is fading. What begins as a happy trio quickly goes sour when she begins to suspect that Bertin has fallen in love with her daughter, whether he knows it or not.

Maupassant is exacting when it comes to emotional misery--he examines every corner of the pain. His well-wrought sentences objectively probe the meaning of desire as he records the details of Bertin's fascination with these two women. Whether he's describing the skylight in the artist's studio, or re-creating the chatter in the club fencing hall, or psychologically probing the Countess's increasing melancholy over growing older, the author's meticulous, excruciating details are exactly right.

No character has protection from Maupassant's penetrating, merciless dissection. His exposure of their motives in love, their true feelings and secret weaknesses, is surgically precise, a psychological analysis predating Proust's longer, more famous analysis of love by a couple decades. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

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