Scarlet And Black (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

Exactly as advertised. I've been wanting to read this for years and I enjoyed it- very intriguing.

Excellent. (Penguin Classics, Translated by Margaret Shaw - beware because I think The Red & The Black is the same book. I've done that before now, bought the same book twice because it has a different title!) Also read The Charterhouse of Parma.

One of my favourite classics beautifully presented. You can't beat a hardback book, a bit of a luxury I know but worth it in this case.

Julien Sorel, son of a peasant, makes his way in 18th century France via a succession of affairs with ladies from a much higher class, causing mayhem to their families en route. A comedy of manners, set amongst the political shenanigans of that time, and very cynical about higher churchmen and petty local bureaucrats. A very funny book, which was misunderstood at the time, excellent on the relations between Julien and the opposite sex, but no Hollywood ending. Extremely well-written, and seems to me very modern in tone.

Yet again a speedy delivery of a beautiful copy of a classic. The book is in excellent condition and arrived really quickly. My only problem is that I've had so many good books through Amazon and their associates recently that I'm way behind on reading them all. But I'll get there! Yet again I'd like to thank everyone involved with this great facility to find copies of books from all over the country from dealers that I didn't know existed, and at really bargain prices (though I'd be happy to pay top prices if I could!) I intend to take advantage of the service as often as possible.

I pulled this off the shelf to read on a couple of recent trips to France. It's the tale of Julien Sorel, an intelligent and ambitious young man in 19th century France, who tries to rise above his plebeian origins by using his wits, talents and gift for deception. Julien is first employed by the mayor of his hometown as a tutor to his children, but finds greater diversion in the seduction of the mayor's wife. He's then sent to a seminary, which he finds stultifying and more worldly than he'd expected, and from there to employment as private secretary to a Parisian diplomat. Here, he becomes enmeshed in his employer's political conspiracies, and also in a relationship with the diplomat's beautiful young daughter.It's probably not giving too much away to say that things don't end well for the hero, but the novel is only partly concerned with his actions and their consequences: it also shows the political and religious aspects of French society during the period of the Bourbon restoration (following the 1814 fall of Napoleon). This includes a lot of historical detail about the tensions between the Liberals and Ultra-Royalists in politics and the Jansenists and Jesuits in the church, which might appear too archaic to merit close attention by the modern reader. However, the story touches on eternal truths about love and ambition, and there's an emphasis on the thoughts and feelings of the characters which is apparently considered prescient when compared to other novels of that period. In addition, the author occasionally speaks directly to the reader in a way that appears refreshingly modern; perhaps the most memorable of these asides comes on p367:"Why, my good sir, a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles in the road below."Spot-on, I thought.

There are several good English translations of ROUGE ET NOIR, the version under review being the earliest still worth reading."Still worth reading" suggests that Moncrieff's successors improved on his attempt, but this is moot.Stendhal's prose is deceptively simple. A first-year French student could probably get through ROUGE with occasional help from Larousse, but that would be a literal reading that didn't do justice to the tone and tempo of the work. It could be argued that the older Penguin version by Margaret Shaw builds on Moncrieff, but though her word and phrases choices are closer to the original, she doesn't seem to catch the bite of Beyle.Slater's version for Oxford Classics reads well, as does Gard's, the latest Penguin offering, but Burton Raffael, accurate though he may be, uses anachronistic "modern" expressions that jar on any reader who knows the earlier versions or, best of all, can read French.The last is the best. Learning to read French adequately isn't difficult, it isn't Russian or Chinese, though understanding and speaking French is, according to me, extremely difficult. I can read Stendhal without a dictionary, but I can't follow the dialogue in a French film without the subtitles.While you're learning, reading Moncrieff would be an excellent way into Stendhal, supplemented by Slater's up-to-date version.In any case, my advice is: "Lisez Stendhal!"

Although the book is very popular one written by a well known writer, the uniqueness of this particular edition is that it is hardbound with very good format.