![]() ![]() ![]() What ultimately drives the narrative forward is Marcenat's flawed hindsight, a meticulous inventory of that infernal ability we humans will always possess, to produce a careful accounting of life's lessons without learning much at all. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Marcenat's meeting and marrying two women, first young Odile Malet, a striking blonde, both willful and venturesome, and then the accommodating, staid but in her own way quixotic Isabelle de Cheverny.īut should this sketchy summary begin to evoke notions of a quaint literary artifact, fear that not. Recounting, at a stately pace, the thwarted romance of Philippe Marcenat, the well-to-do heir to a textile factory, it's a story compiled after the fact, through letters, diary entries and a constant stream of conversations and ruminations. Like most true love stories, André Maurois' "Climates," newly translated for this Other Press reissue of the 1928 French novel, is as much a story of pride and jealousy, a melancholy postmortem on the terribly avoidable yet somehow inevitable means by which we become "the craftsman of our own unhappiness." ![]()
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