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Title: The Charterhouse of Parma by Richard Howard, Robert A. Parker, Stendhal ISBN: 0-679-78318-0 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.12 (26 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Maybe it's the translation?
Comment: It seems strange to be entering a rating for a novel so firmly entrenched as a classic. I really just came here looking for other readers' responses, because I have found this book, in the Everyman translation, so deadly dull that I have been using it as a soporific for over six months, and I'm still 100 pages from the end. The characters have never come to life for me; indeed the whole world of the novel seems very distant and thin. Therefore it's fascinating to read the reviews below. Am I missing some gene that makes it possible to enjoy this strange narrative?
Rating: 5
Summary: Bliss
Comment: I'm a longtime fan of this wonderful novel which until recently almost no one seemed to read. There is nothing like it in the whole of literature, and the good reader is exhilirated and refreshed by the blast of Stendhal's sustained burst of inspiration: done in six and a half weeks and he lopped off the last 150 pages at the publisher's request (and realized his mistake but couldn't find the sheets: keep looking, folks). New readers are advised to plow through the first 50 pages, which are just as good as the rest of the book but from which it is very difficult to catch the book's unique tone; the great set-piece of the Battle of Waterloo will set you straight. I'm not sure that the vaunted new Richard Howard translation is better than the reliable old waddle of the Penguin, but that might just be my hankering for a familiar flavor. But what a book! Bliss to read it, and the Duchessa Sanseverina might well be the most magnificent woman in the whole of literature; she's certainly the only woman of such stature in 19th century fiction who doesn't have to pay the price for it by a suicide in the last chapter. Much of the book's inimitable energy derives from the enjambment of a whole range of incompatibles: a story out of renaissance Italy set in post-Napoleonic times; characters simultaneously seen from the perspective of great worldly experience and that of an enthusiastic adolescence conceiving them as larger than life (Mosca and the Duchessa primarily, but also demi-villains like the Prince and the hilarious Rassi); and so on. Fabrizio is a dashing cipher, is occasionally idiotic, the very archetype of impassioned inexperience. All right, Clelia Conti is irredeemably dull in a book suffused by the Duchessa's nearly superhuman radiance, but her stint as the bird-woman of the Farnese Tower raises to the pitch of inspired looniness Stendhal's sense of the world as a place in which all essential thought and emotion are sentenced to a fugitive life and an interminable series of codes and disguises. Fabrizio's terror of engaging with his auntie the Duchessa generates the subsequent phantasmagoria of prisons, intrigues, revolutions; and yet the tone is that of some crazed, inspired operetta, the characters speak in recitative, and the multiple ironies of character and tale serve not to distance us from life, as our modern irony usually does, but to embrace an astounding range of living contradictions. A last one such: notice that despite the utter scarcity of physical description, the sensory world comes to you crystal clear, vivid as can be. Major magic working here. The book is a source of joy for anyone who enters it whole, and nothing this side of Shakespeare is as bracing. I'm so glad it's being taken up and read again.
Rating: 5
Summary: Well
Comment: I understand that Stendahl is the French equal of Alessandro Manzoni or Leo Tolstoy. Based on that alone, Hell yes you should read this book!
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Title: The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Stendhal, Roger Gard ISBN: 0140447644 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 24 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: Lost Illusions by Honore De Balzac, Kathleen Raine ISBN: 0375757902 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 13 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann ISBN: 0679772871 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford World's Classics) by Stendhal, Catherine Slater ISBN: 0192838717 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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