The Malady of the Century

Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Odilon Redon, Johan Christian Dahl and Francisco Goya. A young man of the 1880s, exhausted by his own century, drifts between Berlin, Paris and a woman who is worse for him than the age is. Nordau was a physician who co-founded the World Zionist Organization with Herzl — and who wrote Degeneration, the book that told Europe its artists were sick. Here he puts the same diagnosis into a novel, and the patient is a man very like himself. Fifty-eight plates, among them Munch and Goya, trace the same unsettled northern light and restless figures that haunt Nordau's drifting hero.