Morand's luxurious prose are absolutely breathtaking for about 50 pages, and then the book just plunges off the deep end thematically, where his prose now flip from a blessing the worst curse possible.

Disgusting themes, reprehensible actions, and so much more afflict the protagonists of this novel, whose descent into depravity boggles the mind. The protagonists recovery/healing journey isn't really well earned, and the ending was a little dissatisfying, but I had to stop reading the book on three occasions to write down my notes (it was a library book, so no annotations for me!).

I cannot recommend this book to many people, and mostly just read it as a curiosity because it's OOP and hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. It's def not worth that, but it's free from the library, and that was totally fine.