Alien Hearts

(Paperback, Main)

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Alien Hearts was the last novel that Maupassant completed before succumbing to the effects of tertiary syphilis of which he was to die at 43. It is the most original and surprising of his novels and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. Alien Hearts is the story of three lovers bound by bitterness as much as passion. Maupassant's artist hero falls for a woman of the world-a glacially dazzling beauty whose past with an abusive husband leads her to hold him-and everyone-at arm's length. He seeks solace with his doting mistress, but remains racked by pointless infatuation. Richard Howard's new English version of this complex and brooding psychological novel reveals the final, unexpected flowering of the great French realist's art.

Reviews

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 authors 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 worlds 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." Harpers

Author Bio

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), after serving in the Franco-Prussian War, became a close friend of Flaubert and his circle. He wrote hundreds of short stories as well as novels and verse. In his later years, he suffered from mental illness, and he died in an asylum. RICHARD HOWARD is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including, for NYRB, Marc Fumaroli's When the World Spoke French, Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, and Maupassant's Alien Hearts. He has received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du Mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry. His most recent book of poems, inspired by his own schooling in Ohio, is A Progressive Education (2014).