What a wild ride.  Gothic mysticism is the best way to describe it, I guess.  Although I was unfamiliar with the French writer, he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times, so there’s that. The book opens in a straightforward way with a pleasant young man being summoned to the estate of his recently deceased great-uncle.  He is dropped off by carriage in a desolate expanse of fields and wetlands where he is met by a taciturn shepherd sent to escort […]