Bruges-la-Morte
Bruges-la-Morte
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Calvino, Italo
Mariner Books 1972
SKU S03719
Translated, with an introduction, by Will Stone
A widower, Hugues Viane, takes refuge in the decay of Bruges, living among the relics of his dead wife as he transforms his home and the very city he inhabits into her spatial embalmment. Spinning out his existence in a mournful, silent labyrinth of entombed streets and the cold arteries of canals, Viane takes comfort in his narcissistic delirium, living both for and within his deceased love, until his world is shaken when he meets his wife’s doppelganger: a young dancer encountered in the street, whose appearance conjures a sequence of events that will introduce the specter of reality into his ritualist dream-state to disastrous effect.
Regarded by many as the archetype of the symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, first published in 1892, remains Georges Rodenbach’s most famous work: a carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy that has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was also precursory to works by such authors as André Breton and W. G. Sebald in being the first novel to use photographs as illustrations—to allow readers, as Rodenbach put it, to “be subject to the presence of the town, feel the contagion of the neighboring waters, sense in their turn the shadow of the high towers reaching across the text.”
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