Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was the pen name of Louis Marie Julien Viaud, a French naval officer and novelist whose career took him to Brittany, Turkey, Tahiti, Japan, China and Morocco, and who transformed those journeys into fiction of remarkable atmospheric power. Elected to the Académie française in 1891, he was among the most celebrated French writers of his era. Madame Chrysanthème (1887), drawn from his time in Nagasaki, stands as his most controversial and most debated novel: an unflinching account of a temporary marriage, and a long meditation on the limits of understanding between cultures.