Customer Reviews

Belle du Seigneur: A Novel

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This magnificent opus of Albert Cohen is much more than The story of love. It is the story of the dream of love (not only personal, but also in its abstract form) and its impossible realization. It offers an original view of both male and female human nature in matters of love and life. It also contains some of the funniest chapters describing bourgeois society (Swiss, French, Belgian, German, Jewish - you name it) and its values and prejudices, and diplomatic life. Some may find it exaggerated and longwinded, but others will enjoy every single word, and re-read this book every so often. If you can't read it in the original French, don't miss this opportunity and read the English translation.

Albert Cohen's masterpiece is intimidating both for its size and chapter-long sentences. But, please, do not be discouraged. This is one of the most insightful novels I have read. It delves into the bureacratic labyrinth of international institutions, mocks their functionaries, and is a haunting critique of European virtues on the eve of the Second World War. (Particularly funny for those familar with the World Bank, UN, or government anywhere).

But, most importantly, it portrays the relationship between men and women in a profound yet comic way. The book's difficulty is quite worth the struggle, especially when you reach the chapter where Solal seduces his beloved. A chapter that is hard for me to forget, for it shows just how stupid and cruel we are.

This is not for the lazy readers, but if you have any guts, read this one. Its worth the while.

What an amazing book. I can't think of many books that can trace the story of a love affair the way this book does. Like an arc, it starts with animosity and goes through flirtation, infatuation, love, obsession, and descends into distate, resentment, morbidity. This book exhausts emotionally and absorbs intellectually. Solal and Ariane are so complicated and interesting as characters; and what an utter twit Ariane's husband is!

Cohen's stream of consciousness - beautiful- style leaves us no escape from this absolute, uncompromising love. I have read the book many times, and it never fails to overwhelm me...although I should add that I have never been able to read the last 20 pages... Ariane and Solal are the most beautiful lovers since forever, unconcerned by others - it is the history of love from start to, ufortunately, the end..
(By the way, the novel does not take place in France, but Switzerland)

Albert Cohen's book is a book on love as Jesus would have written, should he have had any such talent. It's an enlightening and exceptionaly touching account of mutual conquest and destruction, embedded in clouds of wisdom and insight on all aspects of life, religion and culture. It will secretly whisper to your soul its slowly unraveling wisdom on the very few essential things in life. It's a very noble and European-like piece of art and one of mankind's greatest contributions to its struggle against death, as it will stand out for ever.

I sort of liked the protagonist's (if we can call him that) little hobbitty relatives, but 30 pages or so of their witty repartee ensconced in 986 interminable pages of boring sex and self absorption is a pretty low return on my investment.

This mammoth and unforgettable book is both hilarious (a rival to CATCH-22) and very poignant. It is a crime against culture that it was so long unavailable in English. A long and astonishing tour-de-force!

This book is 850 pages thick in the French version. But we are talking abt 850 pages of pure romance. 850 pages of emotions. A quest for true love, redemption through love... Christophe Xof

This is a truly a book by which to drive oneself mad, or so I found it. I could go on about a million little things here evoked by spending hour upon hour reading and rereading this self-defeating novel - for that's the essential problem here, not only are the lovers self-defeating, but the work itself is - but it would be, in the end, as futile an endeavour as the book and, aside from that, Amazon limits me here to 1,000 words.

Right. First off, the book is full of reams of haute-bourgeoisie tittle-tattle which its defenders describe as comedic satire, but which doesn't come across as droll or biting at all. It's simply inane. That's the first hurdle the intrepid reader of the book will have to negotiate.

Having thus been forewarned, what this literary pastiche takes as its subject is twofold, the second following from the first: 1 :) The essential bestiality of man in all his affairs, but especially love. All else is an illusory veneer shadowing power, which all of us worship, however we humans try to delude ourselves. We are all, as Cohen bangs on about time and again "future corpses" and "apes." This reductionism is taken to its extreme and logical terminus: All art, painting, music etc is rubbish save that it allows the powerful caveman to drag the all too willing cavewoman into his lair. 2.) Anti-Proustianism. This is not, as translator David Coward makes clear in his exordium to the book "Albert Cohen and Belle Du Seigneur," merely the opinion, voiced time and again, of our male protagonist Solal, but that of Cohen himself. Why this is so is quite obvious: One can't regard as valid truly numinous experiences transcending all earthy power, as narrator Marcel does, with art, music, cathedrals and, above all, the suffering induced by love, if it is all a sop to what poet Ezra Pound called "the twitching of an abdominal nerve" or what Cohen via Solal continually portrays herein as "wriggling together like fish." I am utterly baffled and nonplussed by apparently serious reviewers comparing Cohen to Proust, which is exactly what he emphatically is NOT, by Cohen's own disavowal of the greater artist.

There are other aspects to the book of course. The other overarching theme is that all true love is damned to the hell which Solal and Ariane find themselves almost from the start of the famous seduction chapter, rather like Dante's couple in the Inferno - to whom Cohen alludes - damned to the hell of togetherness forever.
I could write an entire review about how Cohen's interior monologue chapters are so obviously pale copies from Leopold and Molly Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses or a million other ways in which the book, au fond, fails in the execution. But the essential problem is the reductionist view of life from which all the other thematic problems spring.

But here is the quote which should be emblazoned across the front of the book:

"Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge."

Cohen? No, Proust. But Proust does not despair, for out of the very sufferings engendered by the amorous life arises spiritual awareness and out of spiritual awareness, art. The problem with writers who would joust with Proust is that they'll find that he's already entered the lists and covered the ground well before them.

Translator David Coward ends his exordium with the asseveration: "Belle de Seigneur has the epic grandeur of a descent into hell." Reading it is certainly a descent into a whirligig of pastiches, styles and bilious misanthropy. But as for "epic grandeur" - this is, sadly, exactly what the book lacks.

It's rather if Lucifer tripped.

Read that book!