First published 2013
Tullio Hermil possesses everything a man could want: wealth, noble blood, and a sharp intellect. Yet beneath his privileged exterior lurks a mind fracturing under the weight of its own excess. As Tullio descends into psychological turmoil, his capacity for love becomes twisted into something neurotic and consuming. The story unfolds as his confession, revealing layer by layer how his obsessions have poisoned his relationships and his sanity. Tullio embodies all the contradictions and extremes of his class and era, a figure whose very advantages become the instruments of his undoing. His tale becomes a study in how privilege cannot protect against the mind's capacity for self-destruction, and how love itself can become a form of madness when filtered through a consciousness already teetering on the edge of collapse.
Genres: fiction, 20th-century, psychological-thriller, 19th-century
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: psychological-drama, unreliable-narrator
Period: 19th-Century, 20th-Century
287 pages · Kindle Edition · Dedalus
Content warnings: mental-illness