Found this in library and synopsis sounds interesting. Is it actually good or just bloated like all other French classics?
Found this in library and synopsis sounds interesting.
Found this in library and synopsis sounds interesting. Is it actually good or just bloated like all other French classics?
I just started reading it and it and iam convinced that it's a great book.
One of the best
Op tell us how it went
a histrionic failure.
mawkish, vapid, francophilic narcissism in print. read something better than this.
the "protagonist" (a loathsome creature) is the french iteration of a mary sue. reviled by his government, loved and lusted after by literally every woman in existence, and martyred. it's an insufferable work. Stendhal deserves a pitchcapping.
>reviled by his government, loved and lusted after by literally every woman in existence, and martyred.
he's literally me
>francophilic
Is this proper to say about a Frenchman? Odd choice.
What makes you like them better? I have read none of the three.
it's a frenchman who loves his frenchness.
You're the same British guy I was arguing with about breadth of taste and Milton and Don Quixote in the favorites thread, aren't you? I've been continuing to reread Paradise Lost and continuing to like Milton more and more, just to spite you.
But with Stendhal, not having read him like I said, my guess based on what I've read about him would be that he was mostly writing for fun and fricking around, not trying to portray a realistic character. He strikes me as eccentric in a way that I don't find especially interesting but you're probably holding him to a standard to which it doesn't really make sense to hold him.
>Is this proper to say about a Frenchman? Odd choice.
France is predominantly Anglophile.
France is anglophile
England is Francophile
Charming
>What makes you like them better?
The Charterhouse of Parma is like a romantic thriller that's completely chaotic, sloppy, messy, and all over the place (I think he wrote it in like 50 days) but somehow in a good way and more realistic than The Red and the Black, while retaining the psychological elements which make him an interesting early author in this style in the first place.
Stendhal's prose is very nice and easy to read, but I prefer a little more rough "world building", which Hugo and Balzac offer, especially when they contrast their stories with weird tangents about random nonsense.
Hugo harshly juxtaposes melodrama with non-fictional passages about topics like Parisian dialects and sewers, Gothic architecture, etc. It feels completely detached from the story but it somehow adds a lot to it, which is a typical realist excuse.
Balzac wrote much more (although a lot of dreck) and I just prefer his recurring characters because they seem more real and when they reappear in other works they are almost always transformed, usually more corrupt. Also many people find his autistic tangents about inheritance, money, the law, land-owning, etc. absolutely dull, but I quite like them most of the time.
It's quite good. It can be a bit confusing at first with the ease that Stendhal switches between internal and external dialogues and between the various characters in the novel. You can tell that the second half of the novel is rushed to hell, but it ends quite exceptionally; I would find it hard to believe that people would walk away from the novel without seeing themselves and their society accurately represented in the work despite the long temporal remove it has from us moderns. If you end up liking it I'd also recommend The Charterhouse of Parma, it is twice as slapdash, borderline comic book level of just throwing shit at the wall and never editing to cohesion, but still fascinating work about love, fate, and how society shits on both of them.
>It can be a bit confusing at first with the ease that Stendhal switches between internal and external dialogues and between the various characters in the novel.
Really? If so , you should not read Russian lit then.
It's bloated and unbelievably plain
It's pretty good, but The Charterhouse of Parma is better. As for the author, Hugo and Balzac are better.
So if I dislike Hugo there's no chance of me liking this guy?
that's not what that means at all.
That's exactly what I meant
Okay but I dislike Hugo and Balzac's novels but do like Stendhal, so stop discouraging strangers with your poor critical skills
Red and the black was one of JFKs favorite books
And look how that turned out.
Yeah it blew his mind. moron
nietzsche and tolstoy considered this guy to be great so I should give him a shot
I started reading it and was immediately bored. Metamorphosis was 100x better. I just want to read about people turning to bugs or something dope not cringe descriptions of cobblestone streets.
>IQfy - Literature
stendhal is a french bourgeois, ie a sex craved coomer desperate for sex
moronic memespeak, useless post.
It’s depraved 2bqhwy
20 years ago: find book in library, wonder whether it's interesting, read it to find out, enrich yourself and deepen your ability to appreciate and evaluate books you're unfamiliar with.
Now: find book in library, wonder whether it's interesting, go home and ask IQfy, read fifth-hand opinions from people who only think in terms of reductive memes, never actually read the book.
It's a classic. Although Stendhal's books tend to start great and then as it goes along you feel less and less like you know where it's going. More of a problem with his unfinished books, but it's possible you'll have a somewhat hard time getting through some of it. It isn't short either. Other that that, brilliant book, great start, great ending. I'd also recommend his life of henry brulard, a autobiographic novel written in the 1830s that feels like it was written in the 1930s. Unfinished though. There's a contingent of people who love Stendhal, but some people just don't feel him. He's one of those.
It is the greatest novel I have ever read.
How many novels have you read?
>Stendhal
I currently read his Memoirs of an Egotist, and is enjoyable. He also wrote Napoleon’s biography — the author was a fan of him.