Outlaws and Sorrows

This beautiful collection from early French Romantic Nodier (1780–1844) offers mesmerizing prose, profound philosophical insight, and loving portraits of heroes holding on to their passions by bare threads. In “Outlaws,” a man falls in love with both a man, Lovely, and a woman, Stella. This triangle leads him to muse, “I think that if amour did not exist, disorder of the elements would make the need for it felt,” which could be the thesis statement of Nodier’s works. The theme of forbidden love carries through into “The Painter of Salzburg,” a series of tormented and increasingly macabre journal entries about the narrator’s romantic infatuation. “The Napoleonad,” a prose poem condemning Napoleon Bonaparte, takes the collection on a brief political detour before returning to themes of passion, longing, solitude, and death in “Sorrows, or, Miscellanies Taken from the Notebooks of a Suicide,” 11 fragmented tales written in both prose and dramatic format. Anyone with an appreciation for Romantic literature should take note. (Sept.)