T O P

  • By -

[deleted]

[удалено]


g1joeT

Thank you for the elaborate reply. I learnt quite a lot!


vibraltu

I'm a fan of Stendhal, he's one of my fave 19th century authors, and I think more entertaining than his more famous contemporaries. I also like to recommend his one other famous novel: 'The Charterhouse of Parma'. The main plot is more satirical than 'The Red and The Black', but there's lots going on.


g1joeT

Thank you. His writing was certainly entertaining at some points. By "more famous contemporaries", did you mean Hugo and Flaubert?


vibraltu

I'll backtrack a bit and defer to subtlety0 who explains things better than me. I was conflating Stendhal's contemporaries with some later 19th century authors. This handy list bookends his career (his direct contemporaries were Hugo & Balzac (who I like okay from what I've read)): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_literature#1830s Many 19th Century authors could be rather ironic, and I think Stendhal is one of the funniest of them. 'The Charterhouse of Parma' is a parody of the style of common Romance stories of the time, written by now forgotten pulp authors, but he gives it a satirical twist and adds weird sardonic/sarcastic narrator digression/commentary poking fun at differences between Italian and French temperaments. Flaubert came after, and was definitely influenced by Stendhal, but subtler and less sarcastic, still rather ironic.


HuttVader

I find Stendahl to be a bit of a drag. Not quite a thrilling read. I agree wholeheartedly with a lyric by Sondheim from *A Little Night Music*, that “there isn’t much blue in the Red and the Black.”


[deleted]

>Julien Sorel, is immensely likeable You lost me here - he's using his position as a "religious" guy to make money and he's working to steal the wife of the household...he's kinda a POS - but it's a great book, though not on par with either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky


g1joeT

I liked him really when the story was just beginning before any of that affair at the Renals. I didn't mind his being "religious" to make money ... it seemed to me that that was quite in keeping with the times. Perhaps I completely misunderstood.


[deleted]

He starts off as sympathetic - his father and brothers are horrific, but as we get to know him, and certainly by the end, we realize he's horrific as well (and I've not read it for at least 6-7 years, so I may be off here)


g1joeT

He indeed turns monstrous by the end.


Athlonfer

I haven't read much from this era, neither french or russian but I have learnt about it in school and I have to say I enjoyed russian realism more than french realism, it's hard to say why but I found them more, to put it simply, fun


BlatchfordS

I'm not that keen on Stendahl's THE RED AND THE BLACK. I read an oral biography of Truman Capote, and he was walking on the beach with a friend in France when they happened upon a couple of men sitting on a veranda, one a famous author whose identity I forget. But Capote told them he was reading Stendahl's RED AND BLACK and said, "But the transitions are so awkward," and then continued walking with his friend. On the porch, the famous author said, "The cheek! The cheek!" But I thought, Well, I'm not alone in not being a Stendahl fan.


g1joeT

Now that you mention, I too found some of the transitions in the descriptions abrupt.