A Cruel Enigma

A Cruel Enigma is the English translation of Cruelle Énigme, the 1885 first novel by Paul Bourget (1852-1935), the French novelist and critic who became the leading psychological novelist of the French fin de siècle and was elected to the Académie française in 1894. The novel studies a young man of good family destroyed by his passion for a married woman whose sensual nature contradicts her refined surface, the cruel enigma of the title. Bourget built the book from the analytic method he had developed in his influential Essais de psychologie contemporaine, turning criticism’s instruments on imagined lives. The novel established the psychological fiction that Bourget set against Zola’s naturalism and that influenced writers from Henry James, a personal friend, to the young Proust. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.