Climates
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: Imagine (remember?) being a 14-year-old obsessed with understanding romantic love. You would have swooned forClimates, a beloved 1928 French best seller, newly translated. A novel about two marriages--one in which an insecure man drives away his ethereal (and probably crazy) wife, the other in which the same man subjects his loyal new wife to the kind of emotional torture he previously endured--it’s a kind of old-fashioned parable full of dramatic prose. (The beginning of the marital breakdown is described as “a fine crack [sent] through the transparent crystal of my love.”) But don’t dismiss this delightful novel by “André Maurois,” the pseudonym for French historian Émile Herzog, as simply camp; it is strangely wise about a specific culture and time, as well as about the universal affairs of the heart. --Sara Nelson