Crazy to be tied

I am currently reading an excellent novel, first published in 1900, Anatole Le Braz’s Le Gardien du feu. What I would give to have this talent, the ability to make the most sordid of passions alive and beautiful.

Although it may make you smile to read a lighthouse keeper who tells you his story with such vocabulary and enlightenment, he who, in principle, does not have a good speech, and does not have an excellent education, you have to go beyond this literary trick to let himself be absorbed by the agony of the heart that this man is experiencing.

The story is appalling, based on a miscellaneous fact. A keeper, he tells us right away, has locked his wife and lover in a room in the lighthouse of which he is the keeper. He let them die slowly, to take revenge, while he wrote to his boss to explain both the genesis and the outcome of the tragedy. He promises to kill himself when the two lovers finally die.

I am only a third of the way through the reading, and I already recommend it! I need to discover more of these storytellers who master the human soul and tell it with a passion that amazes any contemporary writing too white. When a text becomes a musical work, so is this Fire Guardian.