Two couples meet at a German spa for nine seasons, and the American narrator explains that he understood none of it — the affairs, the money, the suicide — until it was over. Ford opened with the line about this being the saddest story he ever heard, and then built the whole book on a narrator who cannot be trusted with a single fact. He wrote it as the Great War began, aged forty. Fifty-six plates span 1795 to 1929, with Tissot and Diday among the painters, tracing the harbors, cathedrals and portraits that shadow this tale of passion and its telling.
Two couples meet at a German spa for nine seasons, and the American narrator explains that he understood none of it — the affairs, the money, the suicide — until it was over. Ford opened with the line about this being the saddest story he ever heard, and then built the whole book on a narrator wh...