The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Set in Italy at the time of Waterloo, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma is the imaginary biography of Fabrizio del Dongo. Handsome, aristocratic and charmingly naïve, Fabrizio is a "hero unaware," his destiny shaped by the sensational events going on arund him - at Waterloo, at Lake Como and at Parma, where Fabrizio falls in love with the beautiful Clelia and becomes involved in the almost literal backstabbings of the court.
Stendhal's achievement is to have created a great novel around a small hero. The exquisite art with which he paints his characters and their states of mind (his amoral but bewitching Duchessa Sanseverina, for example), the dramatically episodic structure of the novel, the famous description of the battle of Waterloo: these are rendered here by MRB Shaw into an English translation that is stylishly fluent and precise.
I loved Stendhal's Scarlet and Black. Loved it. So I've been anticipating this book for quite some time. I was disappointed. I was so utterly uncaptivated by it that it took me a solid month to get through it, and it's not that long a book. I just didn't find it nearly as compelling as Scarlet and Black, and that has been such a disappointment. I think it was the combination of Fabrizio's lack of any real awareness of what's going on around him for much of the book, along with the relentless court dramas that just bored the crap out of me. I didn't care what heppened to him, and I really didn't care about all the court crap that was mostly just ridiculous little vanities of the sovereigns. If the story had started much later, and focused more on the love story between Fabrizio and Clelia, maybe it owuld have been a little better, but by the time that had started, I was already thoroughly bored with the him, so even that didn't really suck me in too much. And the ending of it seemed almost like Stendhal ran out of steam or something, because it was all, "Three years later, this incident happened, and then everybody died." What the hell?
So basically, I was intensely disappointed with this book, and will now move on to something that comes highly recommended by several people I know, so hopefully that will be better.
Next up: Shelf Monkey, by Corey Redekop
Stendhal's achievement is to have created a great novel around a small hero. The exquisite art with which he paints his characters and their states of mind (his amoral but bewitching Duchessa Sanseverina, for example), the dramatically episodic structure of the novel, the famous description of the battle of Waterloo: these are rendered here by MRB Shaw into an English translation that is stylishly fluent and precise.
I loved Stendhal's Scarlet and Black. Loved it. So I've been anticipating this book for quite some time. I was disappointed. I was so utterly uncaptivated by it that it took me a solid month to get through it, and it's not that long a book. I just didn't find it nearly as compelling as Scarlet and Black, and that has been such a disappointment. I think it was the combination of Fabrizio's lack of any real awareness of what's going on around him for much of the book, along with the relentless court dramas that just bored the crap out of me. I didn't care what heppened to him, and I really didn't care about all the court crap that was mostly just ridiculous little vanities of the sovereigns. If the story had started much later, and focused more on the love story between Fabrizio and Clelia, maybe it owuld have been a little better, but by the time that had started, I was already thoroughly bored with the him, so even that didn't really suck me in too much. And the ending of it seemed almost like Stendhal ran out of steam or something, because it was all, "Three years later, this incident happened, and then everybody died." What the hell?
So basically, I was intensely disappointed with this book, and will now move on to something that comes highly recommended by several people I know, so hopefully that will be better.
Next up: Shelf Monkey, by Corey Redekop