Conjugal love

In this novel the author of The Woman of Rome and Two Adolescents tells with insight and understanding the story of a love both strong and strange -- a love almost destructive in its intensity. Silvio Baldeschi, confused and tormented by his passionate enthusiasms, brief as they are unstable, longs for two goals in life -- to love and to be loved and to be a great writer. When he marries the beautiful Leda, whose love is so unfathomable and almost sinister that even he cannot fully comprehend it, he seems about to realize both his ambitions. But Leda's love, through no fault of her own, almost destroys her husband's art. On the very eve of Silvio's greatest triumph, when he has at last completed his novel, and when he is most certain of Leda's devotion, he realizes, in a stunning and shocking moment, exactly what he is -- a man who will always be a poor imitator and never a real creator, "nothing but a hopelessly mediocre person".