Mortal Men presents a rigorous debunking of a enduring fictional myth—the deadly woman that has haunted countless paintings, novels, and films. The work unfolds as a calculated game, with arguments that are both lucid and persuasive. Elisenda Julibert, born in Barcelona in 1974, argues that the myth should be blown apart by showing the beloved as a disastrous construct forged by a selfish, isolated observer whose regression becomes a universal tragedy. This framing reframes love as a deeply rooted experience where alienation signals a distorted, even dangerous, form of affection.
What heightens interest is not merely the dismantling of the myth but the quality of that demolition. The text invites readers to watch a small group of fictional men crumble as the supposed evil of femme fatales fades away. Julibert avoids a straightforward social critique, historical injustices, and rigid gender conflict, along with conventional, seemingly integrated perspectives. Instead she frequently returns to intimate emotions that drive mortal relationships—passion, love, jealousy, possessiveness, delusion, alienation, domination—offering a long view that requires careful, patient analysis rather than quick judgments. The critique sits within a framework that nods to established theories associated with thinkers like René Girard, Roland Barthes, and Gustave Flaubert, anchoring the discussion in a meaningful literary lineage.
Julibert develops these discussions by pairing the teasing of emotions with a careful reading of well-known films and novels. Works such as Carmen, That Obscure Object of Desire, Lolita, Vertigo, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and Con faldas or the madman become touchstones for examining how mortal attraction is represented and challenged beyond cliché.
These essays eschew the mundane and aim for precision, avoiding jargon and any fog of ambiguity. The prose remains finely attuned to shifts in thinking, often crystallizing ideas into elegant aphorisms while maintaining accessibility for a broad audience.
The text traces a trajectory from Prosper Mérimée’s naive, or perhaps brazen, portrayal of the fatal woman to a more nuanced and critical view, as seen in Luis Buñuel’s notorious myth. The final sections advance propositions that challenge Freud’s reduction of desire to pure sexual instinct and incorporate a broader, more humane reading of love. The discussion also engages with a broader literary tradition, juxtaposing it with passages from Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished masterwork, which begins as description and moves toward a critique of desire itself. The argument culminates in defending a slower, more contemplative form of love—a modest space to rest from a restless world, a simple, stubborn flame perhaps kept open, allowing each partner to participate in the other’s desires or fears without contempt. This approach urges readers to reconsider the idea that an entire population is condemned by a single archetype and calls for more nuanced representations of desire and affection.
Although Fatal Men may not appear among the year’s most prominent essays at first glance, it reveals a golden literary path for readers who seek depth in how relationships are imagined and contested in fiction.