- Hardcover: 528 pages
- Publisher: Modern Library; New edition edition (Feb 9 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679602453
- ISBN-13: 978-0679602453
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14.4 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 572 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #278,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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Officer, diplomat, spy, journalist, and intermittent genius, Marie Henri Beyle employed more than 200 aliases in the course of his crowded career. His most famous moniker, however, was Stendhal, which he affixed to his greatest work, The Charterhouse of Parma. The author spent a mere seven weeks cranking out this marvel in 1838, setting the fictional equivalent of a land-speed record. To be honest, there are occasional signs of haste, during which he clearly bypassed le mot juste in favor of narrative zing. So what? Stendhal at his sloppiest is still wittier, and wiser about human behavior, than just about any writer you could name. No wonder so meticulous a stylist as Paul Valéry was happy to forgive his sins against French grammar: "We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that."
The plot of The Charterhouse of Parma suggests a run-of-the-mill potboiler, complete with court intrigue, military derring-do, and more romance than you can shake a saber at. But Stendhal had an amazing, pre-Freudian grasp of psychology (at least the Gallic variant). More than most of his contemporaries, he understood the incessant jostling of love, sex, fear, and ambition, not to mention our endless capacity for self-deception. No wonder his hero, Fabrizio de Dongo, seems to know everything and nothing about himself. Even under fire at the Battle of Waterloo, the young Fabrizio has a tendency to lose himself in Napoleonic reverie:
Suddenly everyone galloped off. A few moments later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead, a ploughed field that seemed to be strangely in motion; the furrows were filled with water, and the wet ground that formed their crests was exploding into tiny black fragments flung three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed this odd effect as he passed; then his mind returned to daydreams of the Marshal's glory. He heard a sharp cry beside him: two hussars had fallen, riddled by bullets; and when he turned to look at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort.The quote above, a famous one, captures something of Stendhal's headlong style. Until now, most English-speaking readers have experienced it via C.K. Scott-Moncrieff's superb 1925 translation. But now Richard Howard has modernized his predecessor's period touches, streamlined some of the fussier locutions, and generally given Stendhal his high-velocity due. The result is a timely version of a timeless masterpiece, which shouldn't need to be updated again until, oh, 2050. Crammed with life, lust, and verbal fireworks, The Charterhouse of Parma demonstrates the real truth of its creator's self-composed epitaph: "He lived. He wrote. He loved." --James Marcus
Review
"The Charterhouse of Parma has never sparkled in English with such radiance as it does in Richard Howard's new translation."
--Edmund White
"[A] superb new translation."
--Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books
"An epic tale of war, love, sex, politics, and religion...an action-packed narrative."
--The New Yorker
From the Trade Paperback edition.
--Edmund White
"[A] superb new translation."
--Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books
"An epic tale of war, love, sex, politics, and religion...an action-packed narrative."
--The New Yorker
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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First Sentence
On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, but avoid Howard,
By
This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (Paperback)
Hard to say whether Charterhouse or Red & Black is better; lately I lean to Red & Black (get Catherine Slater's Oxford translation; shun the new B. Raffel paraphrase). The fun of reading Stendhal, I think, is his narration; one briefly feels as clever, as observant, as clear-headed, as the narrator.The Modern Library has apparently decided that, with so many good Stendhal translations out there (Slater; Mauldin's Charterhouse; the NEW Penguin R & B; Lowell Bair's Charterhouse), it has a duty to provide bad ones. Richard Howard's translation has errors that even my schoolboy French can pick up. The New Criterion (which may have its own bones to pick w/ Mr. Howard, true) listed a great many flaws in his command of the French. And he's tone deaf to Stendhal in many of my favorite passages (not as bad as the old Shaw Penguins, but bad enough). If you read Howard's Stendhal & think you don't like him, try a better translation.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well,
This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (Paperback)
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!
4.0 out of 5 stars
Passionate, original, transporting,
By Wordsworth (Greenwich, CT) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (Paperback)
I read this novel after finishing The Red and the Black, which I thought was the far better novel of the two. The scenes in which Fabrizio joins Napoleon's army at Waterloo really come to life and shine in the narrative of Stendahl, as he had been a soldier in battle for Napoleon during his lifetime. Fabrizio really is a bit too much of a narcissist and after a while, despite his handsome youth and intellect, I found myself tiring of him. He really made a number of knuckleheaded moves with his career and women so much so that, at times, he seems to fall far too short of the heroic stature that I'm sure Stendahl intended for him. The women, whom he frequently spurned, seemed to me far superior characters in their nobility than Fabrizio. I did find shades of Lord Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" in some aspects of the irony of his finding solace in his imprisonment. I kept hoping that the Duchess and he would become a permanent item and Stendahl kept me guessing on the plot twists. The novel was written in only about seven weeks, which is a fairly remarkable creative outpouring. Considering the big rush the writing is quite good but I wonder why he hastened the creative execution to such an extreme. Great writing usually just doesn't emerge in such a brief span and speed is not conducive to quality, as most of the hacks on bestseller lists in America conclusively prove. The Red and the Black is just so much more finished and impressive as a novel than Charterhouse, which struck me in places as contrived and unlikely and tried my willing suspension of disbelief to the point at which I found myself saying, "Come on, Fabrizio, grow up." Stendahl is a master of the epigram and there are plenty here to savor, moreso in the context of courtly life in Red and the Black, perhaps. The landscape was beautifully rendered by Stendahl in Lake Como. His portrait work with his characters is quite good. If you only intend to read one of Stendahl's novels, then I recommend The Red and the Black. But if you've read and enjoyed it, odds are that the Charterhouse of Parma will also hold you in its spell. Charterhouse, however, falls just shy of greatness because it was so rushed, I think, and Red and the Black is a masterpiece that justly ranks Stendahl with Balzac, Moliere, Flaubert and Zola.
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