Rating: WARTY!
Purportedly based on the real life of Alphonsine Rose Plessis, a French courtesan and popular mistress who died at the age of 23 from tuberculosis, and whose belongings were auctioned-off to pay her debts. Alexandre Dumas fils had an affair with her for about a year, and wrote this semi-fictional account it after her death. His novel became the basis of Verdi's La Traviata
That's how this story begins, with the unnamed narrator learning of such an auction, at which he buys a sort of diary. Madame Gautier (this is how the woman is referred to in the novel) never was Camille. She was Marguerite, and the title of the book in French was La Dame aux Camélias from which 'Camille' was derived, but this novel isn't really about "Camille" - it's about this guy Armand Duval's take on her. Duval is obviously Dumb-Ass himself, and that's how the story goes - or fails to. It's so meandering that it makes the Delta of Venus!) look like Love Canal.
I couldn't stand to real more than a few chapters. It was boring. I kept hoping it would get better, but it never does. It felt like a very selfish novel to me, and far from anything that could be seen as honoring a woman he supposedly had feelings for. I can't commend it base don what I read.
