Carmen and other stories - Prosper Mrime

A selection of stories by one of the earliest exponents of the short-story genre, Prosper Merimee (1803-70). His stories are seen to reveal the paradoxical fascination with the cruelty of violence and passion in a man ostensibly urbane and reticent; to an extent they all explore the contrast between primitive and civilized values.;"Carmen", based on an anecdote recounted to Merimee by a Spanish countess in 1830, may have introduced the literary incarnation of the "femme fatale", the woman whose aura of mystery and malevolence exerts a fatal charm on the weak and unwary.;Apart from the most famous longer tales "Carmen" and "Colomba", this selection includes the shorter stories, regarded by some as his best or most representative work - "Mateo Falcone", "The Storming of the Redoubt", "Tamango", "The Etruscan Vase", "The Game of Backgammon", "The Venus of Ille" and "Lokis". Their subjects range across the tragic enforcement of a Corsican bandit's code of honour, a historical reconstruction of a Franco-Russian battle, illegal slave-trading, overweening, jealous passion underlying a veneer of Parisian civilization, guilty remorse and its consequences, and the seductive and lethal nature of erotic love entwined with apparently supernatural forces.