Rating: 
Summary: The Provisional Character
Review: Fabrizio's dubious lineage is just a small seed of a hint as to the kind of life he will live for everything Fabrizio does has the distinction of being a dubious undertaking. Fabrizio runs away from home to join forces with Napoleans troops only to find himself imprisoned as a spy. A uniform swapping in prison allows Fabrizio to proceed with his plan but in that swapping he is made strangely aware of how flimsy a thing identity can be. The whole book traces Fabrizio from one identity to another, all are convincing but only for the moment they are used in, after that identity is a discardable commodity. This is especially clear in matters of amour. The heart is only as good as its current disguise, tomorrow may well be another matter entirely. It is no wonder existentialists find so much in this book. The merits of the book are many but some parts are definitely better than others. The war scenes are especially well written, they are presented through the fragmented perceptions of Fabrizio and so the experience is very immediate not unlike the battle scenes in Cranes Red Badge of Courage. But the book is not dominated by war which makes up just a few chapters most of the book is about love , that noble and confusing and fickle grail. And though the pursuit is in itself noble, it is also funny. The book is comic in the way the Odyssey is a comedy. And in that book Odysseus has his moments of identity crisis as well. Fabrizio's odyssey among the low and high born in love and war makes for a very engaging read. The ending which I won't give away is less than I expected but that is a small complaint after so much. Anyway I suppose the lad is tired after so many travails so I suppose it makes as much sense as any ending would.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, but avoid Howard
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Wait Any Longer
Review: I came late to Charterhouse of Parma. I read it once when I was younger (in Paris, where you think I might have caught the spark), but my mind was on other things and I finished it more out of duty than pleasure. Years later, I gave it a second shot, and I must say I'm glad I did: I suppose today I might rank it as my favorite novel. I think what the reader needs - what I needed - was a feel for the context. Stendhal stands at the crossroads of so much that is interesting in the modern world. He's a Frenchman who is in love with Italy. He's the small town boy who yearns for Paris - but then is shocked to find it has no mountains. He's the soldier who rode with Napoleon - but the wrong way, having accompanied the great man on the retreat from Moscow. Most of all, he is the ultimate romantic and the ultimate anti-romantic-the great enthusiast with a deadly eye for the absurdity of his own enthusiasm. I think I needed to have some sense of all these dimensions before I could catch the ironies and cross-currents that give the book so much of its drive. But lately, I don't know how many times I've found myself reading some later novel or some bit of more recent history and hearing Stendhal's worldly chuckle at my shoulder. It's the mellow wisdom of a life not always well lived, but for that reason perhaps more tangy and flavorful than a duller counterpart. One of the many charms of the experience to me is to reflect that Stendhal himself was - okay, say it, a loser. He reminds me a bit of the Fusco Brothers in the Sunday funnies: not fat, exactly, maybe a size 40 in a pair of size 38 pants, the guy who never quite gets the girl (don't believe all his stories). All this stuff about how they would appreciate him in 100 years: look, that's bravado, and forget about the fact that it also happened to be true. One giveaway is the almost pitiful display of gratitude he fell into when he learned that he had been discovered by the great Balzac. Other reviewers have complained about translations, and here is a suggestion: at least on second reading (it deserves a second reading), try it in French. My own French is marginal, but Stendhal's is pretty straightforward. He said he used to practice by reading the French civil code: I think that was a joke, but the fact is that at least in the passages of pure narrative, you can pretty much move along. Also: one of the more attractive aspects of French nationalism is that they are pretty good at buffing up their certified celebs. It is easy to get good intelligent (French) "study guides" and such. I got a nice one, by Philippe Berthier, on the Boule Miche, but with the magic of Amazon-France, you ought to be able to get one with a few clicks of the mouse key. But don't deprive yourself of this delight any longer.
Rating: 
Summary: please shoot me
Review: I don't really know exactly why I was so bored by this novel. Perhaps it's because many of the themes and techniques appeared so familiar to me after having read "The Red and the Black": double standards and deceit in love and marriage; the corrupt nature of the church; the use of a handsome, young but feckless youth as the plot catalyst and so on. Perhaps the novel was meant to be a satire and needed to be read as such. I tried to do so, but to no avail. Perhaps it was just a comedy: "He was a very handsome young man, and spent his whole life in the woods with a hammer in his hands." [!!] As the story became sillier and sillier, and got bogged down in ludicrous plots centred on the small Italian court of Parma, I really struggled badly. At page 427 of my edition, the text reads "But the reader is perhaps a little tired of all these details of legal procedure, no less than all of these court intrigues." Partly correct - I was tired out long before page 427.
Rating: 
Summary: Passionate, original, transporting
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Well
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Bliss
Review: 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: 
Summary: Maybe it's the translation?
Review: 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:
Summary: thanks to Bloom, a book brought back to life
Review: Most people who have even heard of Stendal know of him as the author of the Red and the Black. Thanks to the praise Harold Bloom bestows on this lesser known work in How to Read and Why, I think many are rediscovering this book as well. Imagine my surprise when I found it not hidden deep in the literature section, but right on the "new release" section thanks to the New modern library edition. Stendal, really Marie Beyle, wrote prodigiously during his lifetime and used over 200 nom de plumes, Stendal being only one of the more well known ones. He dictated this book in 54 days, impressive when you realize its girth. Stendal has been critized by many for his lack of style and proper French grammar, but thanks to fellow writer Balzac who wrote an influential review of the book, it gained much fame. Balzac wrote, "Beyle has written a book in which sublimity glows from chapter after chapter...If the mediocre knew that they had a chance of raising themselves to the level of the sublime by understanding them, La Chartreuse de Parme would have as many readers as Clarissa Harlowe had on its first appearance." This novel has a bit of everything, but mostly court intrigue and love plots as we follow the unlikely hero, Fabrizio through his adventures, the most exciting of which for him seems to be his imprisonment in the tower. His charm lies in his complete inability to realize the importance of anything until after it happens. In fact, he sleeps through most of the important events: he gets drunk and barely remembers his small role in the Battle of Waterloo and later during his "rapture" in the tower, he finally discovers in his boredom that he is happy. As far as actually enjoying this book, I suspect that many modern readers will find parts either boring or hard to follow since many of the Italian court traditions are far from our experience. Unlike other long novels like War and Peace or Madame Bovary, this one might not hold interest levels the same way since it has a much denser plot and much less convincing characters. Still, I think we should appreciate this novel for its incredible scope and faithful recounting of a period long gone. It's not hard to see why it's a great novel, it just may not be as enjoyable to read as other great novels no matter how much praise Balzac heaps upon it.
Rating:
Summary: Literary Avalanche
Review: Stendhal's great novel follows the life of "our young hero" Fabrizio del Dongo (a Lombard nobleman) through the early 1800s and life in-between the various reactionary and revolutionary movements following the French Revolution, including (early on) a turn on the battlefield of Waterloo. It seems to mimic the realist novel but is something else altogether. The Romantic hero is actually an anti-hero, and the various allies and enemies he engenders in his quest for fire by "enthusiasm" turn one way then the next as circumstances dictate. The rapid succession of troubles -- reversals of fortune -- lead the reader into a labyrinth of social mores and historical-cultural shadows that end only by illuminating the timeless landscape of tragedy. Stendhal's worldweariness reads in a manner of a literary mannerism -- it is unclear what his intentions are beyond spinning an extravagant tale of immense intrigue and abominable outcome. His noted style is somewhere between the detached irony George Sand and the great illumined tableau of Balzac. As the story races ahead -- and there are few (perhaps no) denouements allowing the reader to catch his/her breath -- an entire epoch unfolds and begins to collapse. The sheer bravado of Stendhal's performance sketches a period of despotism "marred" by the revolutionary fervor of Northern Italy and one detects an almost structural edifice for the tale lurking below the apparatus of places, venues, situations, character, and -- um -- coloratura. The novel seems to arrive full-blown from the ear of Stendhal and the "libidinal economy" of the protagonist's rebellion (and eventual accommodation) suggests that the tragedy is more a matter of universal portents told against the rugged landscape of Lombardy than an historical tale of ruination by passion. It might be best to read this thing straight through without stopping. Such a strategy enhances the nature of the narrative which is truly a tour de force -- an (intentionally) overwrought avalanche of words and images -- and matches the origin of the text insofar as Stendhal is said to have dictated the story in "a mere seven weeks".
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