Exquisite. Beautifully produced. Jacket illo is gorgeous, and perfectly evokes the feel of the book: vaguely, Europeanly tropical, a little archaic, and serenely lovely. I admire Bataille's concise, elegant story, and translator Richard Howard's lovely prose rendering of it. It's an imperfect story, in that it has a huge scope and only unsatisfying depth. This could be several more in-depth novels. Bataille chose instead to tell all of a story, though without some characteristics of a fully realized novel this can't be "one for the ages."

It says here. Watch: In 200 years, this will be a celebrated non-event in publishing, like "Moby-Dick" was for 1851. ( )