Alien Hearts (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Guy de Maupassant (Author), Richard Howard (Translator, Preface)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: December 1, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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. André Mariolle, a rich, unmarried 37-year-old nobody, is introduced into the artistic salon of the wealthy young widow Madame Michèle 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 André's advances only insofar as they proceed discreetly; however, André is head over heels. She gives herself to him but remains emotionally aloof, leading to André'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. (June)
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Review

“A novel containing such inconceivably beautiful sentences, I would have liked to memorize some. Its psychology sees to the very core of people and, in spite of that, touches them as if with the hand of a kindly old physician.” —Walter Benjamin

“Alien Hearts is perhaps the book that one likes Maupassant best for. The author’s conception of love has sublimed itself into very nearly the true form of
the Canticles and Shakespeare.” —George Saintsbury

"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." --Publishers Weekly

“Maupassant is the world’s most accomplished of narrators.” –Joseph Conrad

“[Maupassant] is brilliantly clever.” –Henry James

“[Maupassant] is so relentlessly artistic that he puts the fear of philosophy in your heart.” –The New York Times

"This is classic Maupassant, beautifully rendered by Howard." –Harper’s

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; Original edition (December 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172604
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172605
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.4 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #813,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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