Charming kind of novella, dealing with the intense love of a widower redirected from his dead wife to a living doppelganger of hers. Identical of body but not of mind she ends up trying to swindle the lovesick man and in the end is killed by him, after mocking his wunderkammer-esque shrine to his dead wife, strangling her with a tress of hair from the dead bride. The surface of the story is enjoyable but what brought me to this was the series of photos interspersed throughout the book, showing the city as you are reading it. Sadly the copy I had replaced the original photos taken by Rodenbach with modern recreations but the old row houses, quays, and churches in the photos seemed to remain the same. There is obviously an inheritance here that authors like Sebald drew upon, which is what interested me in the first place. Aside from the surface plot and the photos, the real meat of the story is the symbolist reading of the story. Rodenbach describes Bruges as a dead city, a lovely corpse, much like the protagonist's bride. This makes one wonder who the doppleganger is meant to be then, and one wonders that if it might be the Paris that Rodenbach would exile himself to?