Climates by André MauroisTranslated by Adriana HunterOther Press, 2012

The first half of Climates, which was originally published in French in 1928, made me think a whole lot about Proust, particularly about The Captive: the story of Philippe, who is consumed by jealousy over the possibility (and, eventually, the actuality) of his wife’s infidelity, has a lot of the same claustrophobia as that book. Philippe, like Proust’s narrator, meets his love while on holiday: in his case, in Florence, where he’s recovering from bronchitis. He is taken by her sweetness; every detail about her seems worth noting. “Her favorite reading matter is fairy tales and poetry,” he writes in his diary, also noting that she “likes danger; she rides horses and jumps difficult obstacles on horseback” (31). He also likes that she brings him out of his own head and into the physical/sensual world:

Odile immediately introduced me to the world of colors and sounds. She took me to the flower market under the lofty arches of the Mercato Nuovo. She mingled with local women buying sprigs of lily of the valley or branches of lilac. She liked the old country priest haggling over laburnum shoots coiling around tall reeds. On the hills below San Miniato, she showed me narrow roads framed by stiflingly hot walls above which burgeoning wisterias trailed their clusters of flowers. (32)

Philippe and Odile marry, but jealousy sets in as soon as they’re back from their honeymoon. Part of the problem is how Philippe idolizes and idealizes his wife: he imagines her as the “Amazon” of his fantasies, a queen to serve, and he wants to keep her perfection to himself. This clashes with her desire for a social life and her awareness of her beauty and desirability. Her awareness of how jealous Philippe is only makes things worse still. He complains about her vagueness, her bad memory, how she contradicts herself when telling him what she’s done and who she’s seen; she complains that he interrogates her and makes her uncomfortable. After a few years of marriage, Odile does take a lover, and after much suffering, Philippe swears he will make her choose between them: she does, and asks him for a divorce. This doesn’t help Philippe’s happiness any, though: having lost Odile, he carries on idolizing her and loving her, even after her death and his own remarriage. He relates all this in the first part of the book, which is in the form of a letter to Isabelle, the woman who ends up being his second wife.

In the second half of the book, things are reversed: Isabelle narrates, and now Philippe is the one causing jealousy; her devotion to him is stifling in the same way his devotion to Odile was. The reversal is sometimes too pat: Philippe and Isabelle go to the same summer fair that he went to with Odile! When he went with Odile she was happy and he was grumpy and didn’t want to be social! When he goes with Isabelle, he loves it, and she’s miserable! After their marriage, Isabelle is threatened by Philippe’s female friends, just like he was threatened by Odile’s male friends! OK, OK, we get the thesis: as Philippe puts it in his journal: “In this drama of love, we take turns in playing the role of the more loved and the less loved. All the lines then switch from one performer to the other, but they stay the same” (240).

Despite that obviousness of theme, I found the style of Climates immensely readable and compelling: this is some lovely smooth prose. I would have liked the book more, though, if Philippe weren’t so full of broad pronouncements on how men are and how women are. Some samples:

• “Men surrender their souls, as women do their bodies, in successive and carefully defended stages.” (4)
• “It seems women’s minds are made of up of the successive sediments laid down by the men who have loved them, just as men’s tastes retain jumbled, superimposed images of the women who have come into their lives” (19-20)
• “I started to glimpse what was for me quite a new understanding of the relationship there needed to be between men and women. I saw women as unstable creatures always striving to find a strong directing force to pin down their wandering thoughts and longings; perhaps this need made it man’s duty to be that infallible compass, that fixed point.” (155)
• “Women are naturally drawn to men whose lives move on, who take them along in that movement, who give them something to do, who ask a lot of them.” (ibid)

At least he writes his wife nice letters? This made me grin: “I received a card from Rome: Cara signora, I am writing to you beside my open window; the sky is cloudless and blue; the pillars and triumphal arches in the Forum rise up from sandy, golden mists. Everything is extraordinarily beautiful” (204). (The landscapes in this book are really lovely: Italian charm and snowy mountains and green forests and rushing torrents. Mmm.)