World Famous Lover
Attractive, attractive, fascinating ... the young Zuleika Dobson is boundless. A world-renowned provider, she speaks like a writer at the end of the century and drags, as a true femme fatale, as much luggage as pretenders. When she can finally visit her grandfather, rector of Oxford, all the students inevitably fall at her feet. Unfortunately for them, she can only love a man totally impervious to her charms ... So much so that all decide - out of dandyism, out of love or out of stupidity - in a macabre contagion, to die for her.
A story of love, collective suicide and nautical regattas, this refined fantasy, beautifully written, takes the rigid Oxford and its actors - young men with love, angry ghosts, calculating gods and worried statues - into a whirlwind of extravagance.
Zuleika Dobson is a rare and refreshing work, an exquisite achievement from an underestimated writer. Born in 1872, "the matchless Max" Beerbohm, as George Bernard Shaw had dubbed him, was Victorian to a point, ironic to another and playful all the way. Talented caricaturist, literary critic close to Oscar Wilde, friend of Somerset Maugham and Truman Capote, it is not without panache that at 23 he published his complete works ...
The happy hypocrite: a fairy tale for tired men (Grasset) and the astonishing Seven characters (Joëlle Losfeld) have been translated into French. But we especially owe Max Beerbohm piquant essays like "The Empire of the Red", and very many caricatures. He signs here his only novel, of which we offer a fully revised and skillfully illustrated translation, which finally does honor to what it is: a pearl of English literature.
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