I started the year with Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert, inspired by his travels to the Orient. I must not have frequented the same holiday resorts. The skin-tight tunics, the Macistes in sandals, well-oiled and blown up on steroids, the princesses airing their belly buttons, emulating Nina Hagen, not exactly my cup of mint tea. But for me, it's a genuine literary crush. From the opening lines, the tone is given to us. At once disarmingly simple, extraordinarily poetic and flamboyantly exotic. It resembles the beginning of a fable, with that sonorous and harmonious sentence that rings like a haiku and invites you to turn the pages.

It's an enormous novel, like the elephants that traverse its pages, destroying everything in their path. Flaubert's imagination here is at its peak. A whirlwind of images. A torrent of sensations, of emotions, of passionate love.

I’ll quickly lay out the plot for you. We're in the 3rd century BC, after the First Punic War. The wealthy merchants of Carthage, more concerned with their riches than with the city, refuse to pay what they owe the army of mercenaries who valiantly fought Rome alongside Hamilcar, the greatest Carthaginian general. The mercenaries then decide to revolt and attack the city. It's carnage in Carthage.

One man, the leader of the mercenaries, the Libyan Mâtho, falls madly in love with this divine virgin. From this encounter a fatal liaison is born, one that plunges everyone into war, a merciless war featuring the conquest of power, conquest of Carthage, conquest of Salammbô. After this, all the love scenes you encounter in other novels will seem rather insipid.

It's a narrative of tremendous ferocity. Flaubert's words in their precision exist to also express the unspeakable. In this disaster and madness, Salammbô doesn't only embody passionate love: she's a femme fatale, damned, like those from mythological tales who caused wars, precipitated the fall of empires through their beauty and mystery. How can one not think then of Helen, of the Trojan War, of the Iliad?

There's a precision to the writing, it's like a lyrical song, a kind of opera, it's an epic film in poetic prose, these are words tinged with scents and colors, to convey the horror, the wars, human madness. The fluid beauty of Salammbô's writing is timeless. It's bewitching and devastating like the armies clashing under the Carthaginian sun for Salammbô. It's just beautiful.