Carmen – Prosper Mérimée | A Graphic Novel

Andalusia, autumn 1830. One traveller, one cigar, one bandit with a blunderbuss in his hand. And one woman who belongs to nobody.

Mérimée's Carmen, the story that gave birth to Bizet's opera, told here the way its author wrote it: dry, sharp and without the opera's gilt. A French archaeologist shares a cigar, in the shade of a gorge, with a man who has two hundred ducats on his head. On the quay above the Guadalquivir in Cordova he meets a gipsy who reads his palm and steals his watch. And in a prison cell, the day before the garrotte, Don José tells him everything: the tobacco factory in Seville, the acacia flower flicked between his eyes, the escape through the Street of the Serpent, the smugglers in the sierra, the one-eyed husband, the Englishman's gold, Lucas the picador, and the hermit's cross in the wood.

A graphic novel in 293 panels, black ink and grey wash in the spirit of nineteenth-century romantic book engravings. The words are Mérimée's, in Lady Mary Loyd's classic translation. Nothing added, nothing prettified.

"The dog and the wolf can't agree for long." – Carmen

149 pages. DRM-free PDF and EPUB included. Read on any device.