Léon’s characters are seen in half-light, reclining in the worn decadence of the Great Room, in shades of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, in which the Latin and Greek scholars of Hampden College aspire to speak and dress like the classicists they admire, mingling next to the hearth and drinking wine. Lenny and Hermin seem to exist in another time and place, to the extent that it is not until the last pages that an apparatus of modernity appears when Hermin jumps into his car to go after Lenny who had left Pommier Chenin in the middle of the night. John Cullen’s translation revels in this winter landscape finding fifty words for snow: “a river full of ice floes” (9), “like crystal embedded in rock” (20), “[t]he slopes were covered with an opalescent coat” (140).