Carmen

What a terrible novella. It is a caricatured farce, with uninteresting, horrible people doing uninteresting, horrible things with motives that are neither understandable nor clear. I'm fine with antiheroes-but the reader must find them compelling and see their humanity. But these characters are flat, and the reader has no reason to grasp or relate to why any of them are drawn to one another. Carmen herself is just a 19th-centiry manic pixie dream girl and the reader does not find her mysterious, alluring, seductive, or any thing else that the flat syntax tells us over and over again that we are supposed to think about her. Don Jose's character is nonsensical and his transformation from bad to worse person is uneven and unrealistic. In short, this book entirely lacks any sense of humanity and beauty. It is supposedly a story of passion and obsession gone too far, but it is told in such a detached, sterile fashion that we never connect to it.

Mérimée, a well-known architect, travels to Spain in the company of a local guide. He soon befriends Jose Navarro, a famous criminal. In Cordoba, he meets Carmen, a free-spirit woman who tries to trap him, before being stopped by Jose Navarro himself. Mérimée gets himself together and goes back to the road. Months later, back to Cordoba, he visits Jose in jail, soon to be executed. The two men exchange a cigar, and soon begins the confession of a noble man who became bandit, of his life on the road, of his decisive meeting with the strong and mysterious Carmen.

Prosper Mérimée knows how to depict lively and multi-dimensional character who stays with you long after the book has been closed.

Read in French by Juliette via Audiocité.