Book in a great unmarked condition - Wrapper very good - Translated from the French - Same edition Google image used. >>> On board the S.S. Narcissus for a ten-day "music cruise" of the Mediterranean are twelve passengers: an heiress and her intellectual husband; a movie starlet and her producer boyfriend; the two greatest virtuoso performers of the age; the diva Doriacci and the Bavarian pianist Kreuze; a society hostess from Paris and her financier husband; the gruff Captain Elledocq and his homosexual purser; and two wildcards - a cardshark and swindler posing as an art appraiser, and a young gigolo from the provinces with a perfect body but an untested heart. - To one another they are at first all larger-than-life stereotypes; all surface, beauty, and ego. Indeed the voyage starts out as great entertainment, full of scintillating wit and self-display. Yet beneath each of these false faces lies a landscape of emotional turbulence. An earnest love arises between the two most unlikely pair of passengers, and soon the entire company becoems engaged in the question of whether or not it will succeed. Meanwhile other shipboard romanes, comic and tragic, come and go in a dizzying whirl. In the midst of those wars of the heart come scenes of great lyrical beauty, descriptions of the sea and surges of passion, reflections on age, memory, and our common predicament. - The Painted Lady is Francoise Sagan's richest novel - the story of a sea journey that becomes a ten days' passage through the intricacies of the human heart. (Goodreads)
