Ann Pearson Books

The Simplon Road is a book about literary obsession. In contrasting essays that delve into childhood and early reading, Ann Pearson and Charles Boyle chronicle their involvement with an author who was notoriously keen to cover his tracks. The figure in which the two meet is the French novelist, travel writer and diplomat Stendhal, aka Henri Beyle, aka Henry Brulard, aka any number of alter egos, pseudonyms and reliably unreliable narrators. Pearson and Boyle write frankly about themselves and their relationship with Stendhal, capturing the paradoxes of his writing: even as we feel we know him intimately, we miss him at every turn. They also highlight the 21st-century anxieties that gnaw away at even this most ebulliently self-reinventing of authors: money, identity, relationships, career and, of course, getting on (in every sense).