“Climates” by Andre Maurois (translated by Adriana Hunter)

This novel is a meditation on the nature of love and its myriad of disappointments. The novel is divided into two sections: the first narrated by Philippe, the second by his second wife, Isabelle. Both are stories of doomed love. Maurois’ novel revolves on how romantic relations are necessarily structured around an unequal balance. Between every pair there is always an imbalance. And that is where the power always lies.

In his first marriage, Philippe was the jealous lover, never sure of himself, always in doubt. “Understanding Odile was impossible, and I believe that no man (if he loved her) could have lived with her without suffering…. Just as she had the beauty of a character in a dream, she spent her life in a dream. I have said that she lived mostly in the present moment. She invented the past and the future as and when she needed them, and then forgot what she had invented.” By the time of his second marriage, the power relations in the coupling had reversed. Isabelle hazards, “We are wrong to say love is blind. The truth is that love is indifferent to faults and weaknesses it can see perfectly clearly, if it believes it has found in someone an often indefinable quality that means more to it than anything else.” Nonetheless, she admits, “A man does not gamble his whole life on one love; he has his work, his friends, his ideas. A woman like me lives only for her love.” In the end, however, she has made her peace, “The really important thing I’ve realized in the last year is that if we truly love we mustn’t attach too much importance to the things that the people we love do.... So long as we can keep them, hold on to them, good God, what does the rest matter?”