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Title: Colonialism.
Review: Loti was a professional seaman. When his ship is moored in Nagasaki, he contacts a matrimonial agent for a 'temporary marriage' with a young Japanese girl, Madame Chrysanthème.The novel narrates his sexual (?), and in any case loveless, relationship with the girl as if Loti is keeping a diary, very anecdotally.Loti has not the slightest interest in the Japanese soul. This work has absolutely no psychological content. Loti looks as a real colonialist disdainful and amused upon Japan and the Japanese.If this novel would have been written today, it would certainly be called racist.But it gives a good picture of Nagasaki at the end of the 19th century.To be read as a document about the relationship between the East and the West in the 19th century and about the arrogant mentality in the West at that time.
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