Carmen

The narrator meets a prisoner in Seville who requests one last smoke before confessing to a murder. That prisoner is Don José, a Basque soldier whose downfall began the day he encountered Carmen, a gypsy smuggler with eyes like a panther. She's unlike any woman he's known: dangerous, shameless, magnetic in a way that feels like a knife's edge. When she chooses him, then discards him for the glamorous toreador Escamillo, Don José's love curdles into something monstrous. What follows is one of literature's most unflinching dissections of obsessive passion, told by a man who cannot separate love from possession. Mérimée strips away any romantic gloss from his characters' actions, revealing the ugliness beneath jealousy and the terrible ease with which desire becomes violence. The novella that scandalized 1840s France and inspired Bizet's immortal opera remains startlingly raw: a compact, brutal story about how completely one person can destroy another, and themselves in the process.