A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion, credited to Georges Eekhoud, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion by Georges Eekhoud. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland. A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion was first published in French as Escal-Vigor in 1899, the English translation nine years later. It is as relevant today as it was a century ago, treating the torture of coming out to oneself, the fear and loneliness of isolation, the high cost of coming out to others, and the high value of personal integrity. The protagonist, Count Henry Kehlmark, is a highly educated heir to a large fortune, nurtured by loving and nearly selfless women. The author gradually reveals Henry’s secret, implied by the title, through a series of insinuations much clearer to the reader than to the other characters, as is fitting in a tragedy. His return to his family estate begins to erode the dearly bought prudence of his boarding-school youth. His finding a talented and like-minded student with whom to share the wealth of his mind leads to crises at home and at last to scandal in the community. Although the age of the lad is eighteen when he meets the count, the author's insistence on a significant age difference between the partners (calling the lad a "child" or even a "little boy") makes the friendship appear much too Greek for our comfort in twenty-first century America. A reader unfamiliar with French needs to know that the second-person singular (thou/thee/thy/ thine) is the intimate form of address; the plural (you/your/yours) is formal. (Summary by T. A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion
• Author credits: Georges Eekhoud
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 6
• Listed recording duration: 5:17:00

Catalogue topics

• Belgian
• gay
• lgbt
• queer

Track guide

1. 01 - Part 1, Ch. 1-3 — 56:23
2. 02 - Part 1, Ch. 4-6 — 1:00:21
3. 03 - Part 1, Ch. 7-8 — 23:22
4. 04 - Part 2, Ch. 1-3 — 47:51
5. 05 - Part 2, Ch. 4-8 — 1:08:34
6. 06 - Part 3, Ch. 1-5 — 1:00:29

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.