This short novel, less than 100 pages, was beautifully written, a testament to both the author and the translator of the edition I read, Chris Andrews. Succinct but not sparse, it's a good book for a bibliophile in style and subject, but as the novel went on I felt it leant too heavily into the notion of woman as siren. As I get older, indeed even when I was younger, the idea of women leading uncomplicated, naive men around by attraction, without examination of why feels more hollow, more unrealised, more tiring and so in spite of the prose and the length of this novel, 3 stars.