Amaury: A New Translation
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Book Overview
There is a kind of love that does not resolve. That cannot be acted on, cannot be relinquished, and cannot be made to fit the life that surrounds it. Amaury knows this love from the moment it takes hold of him, and the novel that bears his name is the record of what it costs to carry it - through the obligations that duty imposes, through the slow cruelties of circumstance, through the years that accumulate without changing the essential fact.
Amaury, published in 1843 - on the eve of The Three Musketeers, on the eve of The Count of Monte Cristo - is Alexandre Dumas working in a register that his reputation has largely concealed: the tradition of French sentimental fiction, the intimate novel of passion and renunciation that stretches back through Constant's Adolphe and Chateaubriand's Ren to Rousseau himself. It is a novel without adventure, without historical spectacle, without the machinery of plot that drives his most famous work. What it has instead is psychological precision, emotional honesty, and the particular authority of a writer who understood, from more than imagination, what it means to love beyond the reach of any solution.
Dumas is not the writer one expects to find here. That is exactly why the novel matters - and why, for readers who thought they knew what he could do, it will come as a revelation.
Tender, unsparing, and quietly devastating.
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