The Charterhouse of Parma (Modern Library Classics)

Rating:
Summary: FRENCH CLASSIC
Review: The magic of this classic of French literature will follow you forever after reading Stendahl's work. He was a master of the tale and he was a master of the pen.

Rating:
Summary: Reviewing the novel, not the translation
Review: This is one of the great Romantic novels. It conveys the glory of Napoleon's Italian campaign and the horror of the reactionary counter-revolution. At its center, however, is a love triangle among a Duchess, her nephew (albeit not by blood) Fabrice, and Fabrice's great love Clelia, allowing Stendhal to give us a meditation on the fortuitousness of love, its hazards and its disappointments; at the end the book is dedicated, in English, "TO THE HAPPY FEW." Its view on these matters is more Mediterranean than Anglo-Saxon; for example, any reader with a heart will be rooting for Fabrice and Clelia, even while Fabrice is a priest and Clelia is married to someone else.

Anyone with a couple years of college French should be able to read the original without difficulty, although there may be something to be said for trying to read the novel in as wild a rush as it was composed.

Rating:
Summary: "But is this really a prison?"
Review: Whether it's Thomas Hardy, Tolstoy, or Dickens, I've never met a 19th century novel I didn't like. In his 1999 book, WHY READ THE CLASSICS?, Italo Calvino calls THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA "the best novel ever written," and Harold Bloom also praises it in his HOW TO READ AND WHY. Written in 52 days, THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA (1839) opens amidst the rumble of cannons on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and then follows its young Italian protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, from one "nasty scrape" (p. 193) to the next. "A little drunk" (p. 46), we find our unlikely hero sleeping through the Battle of Waterloo. Later imprisoned for killing another character in a street fight, he exclaims, "I've never been so happy in my life! . . . Isn't it funny to discover that happiness was waiting for me in a prison?" (p. 327). It is in his prison cell, in the "extremely ugly" (p. 299) Farnese Tower of the fictional Citadel of Parma, that Fabrizio is transformed by love. THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA may be read as a historic novel, a picaresque adventure, a love story, or simply as "a great Italian novel." As translator Richard Howard tells us in the book's Afterward, it is "a miracle of gusto, brio, elan, verve, panache" (p. 503).

G. Merritt