Laclos's only novel has been made into at least two films, but since it is written in epistolary form this violates its true essence. On the screen, the nastiness of the main characters, their heartlessness and sadism and cerebral lust, is brought relentlessly into the foreground, while in the book it becomes more tolerable by being described at second hand. This is in fact one of the great French "psychological" novels, dissecting sexual vanity, male egoism and female bitchery with surgical skill and objectivity, the two male factors even meet their comeuppance in the end, though by then they have left a trail of wreckage. The translation, one of several available, reads well and seems genuinely 18th century in tone, but only someone with a genuine mastery of French is qualified to judge its merits vis-a-vis its competitors.