I’m not sure how exactly to review Jurgen, or Branch Cabell’s works in general. It’s bawdy (it got banned for obscenity, although everything in it is innuendo and wordplay) and melancholy, funny and cynical all at once. The middle aged pawnbroker Jurgen gets back a year of his youth and spends it seducing a variety of lovely semi-mythical women, forgetting each one entirely when he goes on to the next one. Jurgen himself is a fantastically unreliable narrator, and it’s made pretty clear that his lady-loves are generally nowhere near as naive and gullible as he thinks they are. While his body is young, Jurgen’s soul remains middle-aged, and the tale eventually becomes a bittersweet reflection about ideals and reality—the passage where he eventually gets to Heaven and discovers how and why Heaven was created is beautifully sad. It’s a weird, fun, haunting book, very difficult to summarize, but also difficult to forget.