Deceit

The scintillating English-language debut from Felsen, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943, chronicles a spurned love in the vanished world of 1920s Paris, where Felsen began his writing career. The unnamed narrator is a dissolute aesthete who little suspects that his world is about to be thrown into turmoil by the tempestuous Lyolya Heard, a young Russian woman who is soon to make her debut in Parisian society. At first, he’s sure he holds all the cards in the game of seduction, but soon he succumbs to free-spirited Lyolya’s charms. Lyolya, though, is also pursued by her ex-fiancé, a debonair actor named Sergei, and the idea of Sergei tortures her would-be suitor. After Lyolya’s chance introduction to the droll Bobby Wilczewski, a fellow expat from a striving Russian family, she and Bobby have an unconventional affair while the narrator grows increasingly desperate. Indeed, Felsen shows why his peers called him the “Russian Proust” with the narrator’s tortured account of his love and perceived betrayal (“I find myself wanting not only to speak out, to tug at Lyolya’s heartstrings, to try to win her back, but also to punish her, to convince her of the irreparability of her mistakes”). It’s a fittingly volatile record of ruinous desire. (Feb.)