Addicted to celebrity and to variety of illicit substances, she is searching for meaning in world where the only apparent thing of any value is money. After much sadness she will find a method for uncovering the roots of her malaise in a new cure developed by a Viennese doctor by the name of Sigmund Freud. She is a young noblewoman, dissatisfied with bourgeois conventions, who undertakes a journey of self-discovery. Hanna lives in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century. Her serenity and the loose tongues of those who secretly envy her result in her being branded a heretic, with tragic consequences. It is the age of the counterreformation and the Inquisition. Yet her ideas run against the temper of the times. She’s a mystic who talks with animals like Saint Francis she finds God in nature and cannot understand the need for religious rituals. Anne lives in Flanders in the sixteenth century.
Despite the centuries that divide them, their stories intersect-a surprising narrative technique that lends increasing tension and richness to this novel, which builds to a thrilling crescendo of unexpected revelations. Three young women, free spirits all, each one at odds with the age in which they live. Here, as in the other stories in this collection, Schmitt displays the combination of stylishness and insight into the human condition that prompted Kirkus Reviews to write of his tales that they “echo Maupassant’s with their lean narratives, surprise endings, mordant humor and psychological acuity.”Īn exceptional collection by one of Europe’s most beloved authors.Anna, Hanna, and Anny. Bewitched by what he hears, the writer can no longer distinguish what is real from what is not, and in the woman’s account he will finally find a response to his own deep-seated grief. The fairy-tale setting starts to work its magic and the old woman begins to tell her tale-an extraordinary story of passion. His host is a solitary and eccentric octogenarian. In one story, a lovelorn writer seeks refuge in Ostende, a remote and charming town on the North Sea. Humor, tenderness, irony and exquisite writing have always been the hallmarks of Schmitt’s work. In his new collection of stories, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, author of The Most Beautiful Book in the World, probes the paradox that the events that shape our lives are often the stuff of dreams, yet nonetheless true.
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