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Title: Adolphe (Oxford World's Classics) by Benjamin Constant, Margaret Mauldon, Patrick Coleman ISBN: 0-19-283927-6 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Underlooked Classic
Comment: Benjamin Constant is a fascinating figure in the history of French letters. He was amongst a group of writers that were at the forefront of the Romantic Movement in France that included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Constant's mistress, Germaine de Stael. Madame de Stael was a leading light of intellectual society during the directorate and the empire periods. Her salon in Geneva was the meeting place for many of the artists, philosophers, novelists and poets of her day. Benjamin Constant was her lover and most ardent admirer. Critics have long assumed that the core plot of Adolphe, which involves a younger male engaged in a prolonged liaison with an older mistress, must have been autobiographical. L. W. Tancock, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, claims that this is only partly the case. He writes: "What are Eleanore and Adolphe? Of course the factual framework is the story of Anna Lindsay, the beautiful, ageing, foreign mistress of an aristocrat, and so is Ellanore's submissiveness and limited intelligence. On the other hand the possessiveness, the violence, the scenes, the sending out of a search party to bring back the wandering lover, all these things are from the miserable existence of Benjamin with Mme de Stael." So what we are left with basically is an amalgam of autobiography and fiction, somewhat the same formula Tolstoy used in Anna Karenina.
Whereas Tolstoy, in his depiction of a tragic love affair was wonderfully digressive, producing a novel with various sub-plots and a large, colorful canvas, Constant opts for economy and directness. This is a short novel, what by today's standard would be called a novella. It is composed of ten short chapters and is thus, ostensibly, "an easy read." It follows one plot line with one set of characters (though there is a framing narrative, it doesn't interfere with the essential linearity of the story).
The plot is rather familiar to readers of European literature. It follows the would be Cassanova, Adolphe, who, in his early twenties, decides that he must have a mistress if he is to be a man of fashion. He therefore lights upon a woman about ten years older than himself and whom he regards as a realistic target because she is already somewhat socially compromised, as she is the mistress of an older man, a certain Count P___. Elleanore is slow to succumb to Adolphe's machinations, but he is persistent and she eventually yields. The two lovers carry on a secret affair for a period and eventually Count P__ figures out what's going on under his nose and Elleanore makes the decision to leave her supporter and her children and cast her fate with Adolphe. Adolphe by this point has gotten cold feet and tries to dissuade her from leaving children and protector, but she is insanely in love and will follow Adolphe to perfidy and damnation if need be. They leave town and take their illicit love on the road. Adolphe, who has manufactured his feelings for Elleanore in the first place, becomes more and more morose as he realizes he has gotten in over his head and he now has a mistress who is completely dependent on him and who lets him know about it continually. Adolphe's father, meanwhile, who initially insinuated that Adolphe should take on a mistress, entirely disapproves of his son's choice. Finally the couple move to Poland, where Elleanore is to come into a large inheritance and Adolphe finds his existence more and more meaningless. At the urging of one of his father's aristocratic friends in Poland, Adolphe finally comes to the decision that he must break away from Elleanore, so he writes a letter to his father promising to end the affair. She intercepts the letter and falls into a swoon that eventually takes her death's door and to her final demise. Adolphe ends up as a broken man, wandering the outer byways of the continent, lamenting the errors of his ways.
Adolphe is an example of the concise, crystalline form of writing for which the French are noted. It is the form utilized and epitomized by writers such as Abbe Prevost, Rene de Chateaubriand, Alfred De Musset, etc. The novels they produced create in depth what they lack in length. That is one of the reasons we call them classics.
This review is for the Penguin Classics paperback version of Adolphe, prefaced and translated by L.W. Tancock
Rating: 4
Summary: "Woe to he who sees the end of a love affair. . .
Comment: before it has even begun." Or some such. As the other reviewer said, this is a sort of an anti-Werther. Adolphe himself is an amusing fellow, and he had me cringing with sympathy for his efforts to rid-or-not-rid himself of his mistress. Caveat: you might want to look for an edition that includes "The Red Notebook," a hilarious short novel about the far ranging but completely aimless adventures of a similar (but this time mistressless) young man.
Rating: 5
Summary: A heartbreaker speaks out
Comment: "You can't always get what you want", the Rolling Stones famously admitted some decades ago. In a very French, disillusioned way, Constant explores what happens when you do get what you want.
His anti-hero Adolphe manages to win the heart of the woman he has made himself believe he loves. Soon enough, he is no longer so sure about his feelings for her. By that time, however, she has already left her former partner and is emotionally dependent on Adolphe. To put it bluntly, the novel is about his trying and failing to get rid of her. The situation is getting more and more tortuous for both of them.
In a way this novel can be read as an answer to Goethe's famous "Sorrows of Young Werther" in which the protagonist ends up killing himself because he cannot get the girl he loves. Of course Goethe's book was a lot more successful at the time than Constant's. The worth of Constant's novel is that it is one of the few instants in which somebody speaks out with whom somebody else is unhappily in love with. There is less poetry in that position than in the opposite one, but Constant's stark psychological realism in the tradition of the French moralists makes this one a gripping read with a provocative conclusion.
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