Like the other works, “Climates” stays close to its author’s own experience while making it feel universal. Among the miniature masterpieces in this genre are Benjamin Constant’s “Adolphe,” André Gide’s “Strait is the Gate,” Stendhal’s “On Love,” Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse”-and André Maurois’s 1928 novel, “Climates.” Every painful or embarrassing moment is needled out for us on the page. They reveal every power game, every change of emotional weather. It is not only French writers who do this, of course, but they are more than usually observant and often merciless with themselves. Or they may be slim tales or treatises, distilling love to its essence and running it through endless filters of analysis, imagination, reflection, and interrogation. Their books may be vast, like the swathes of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” that deal with jealousy and desire. Sometimes they write autobiographically sometimes they turn reality into fiction. Ever since Pierre Abelard’s twelfth-century “Historia Calamitatum,” they have been writing lucid, passionate first-person accounts of their loves. Is there any human topic more interesting than love?
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