Charterhouse of Parma [Paperback]

Richard Howard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2002

Balzac considered it the most important French novel of his time. Gide later deemed it the greatest of all French novels, and Henry James judged it to be a masterpiece. Now, in a major literary event, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and distinguished translator Richard Howard presents a new rendition of Stendhal's epic tale of romance, adventure and court intrigue set in early nineteenth-century Italy. The Charterhouse of Parma chronicles the exploits of Fabrizio del Dongo, an ardent young aristocrat who joins Napoleon's army just before the Battle of Waterloo. Yet perhaps the novel's most unforgettable characters are the hero's beautiful aunt, the alluring Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, Count Mosca, who plot to further Fabrizio's political career at the treacherous court of Parma. A sweeping story that illuminates an entire epoch of European history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Officer, diplomat, spy, journalist, and intermittent genius, Marie Henri Beyle employed more than 200 aliases in the course of his crowded career. His most famous moniker, however, was Stendhal, which he affixed to his greatest work, The Charterhouse of Parma. The author spent a mere seven weeks cranking out this marvel in 1838, setting the fictional equivalent of a land-speed record. To be honest, there are occasional signs of haste, during which he clearly bypassed le mot juste in favor of narrative zing. So what? Stendhal at his sloppiest is still wittier, and wiser about human behavior, than just about any writer you could name. No wonder so meticulous a stylist as Paul Valéry was happy to forgive his sins against French grammar: "We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that."

The plot of The Charterhouse of Parma suggests a run-of-the-mill potboiler, complete with court intrigue, military derring-do, and more romance than you can shake a saber at. But Stendhal had an amazing, pre-Freudian grasp of psychology (at least the Gallic variant). More than most of his contemporaries, he understood the incessant jostling of love, sex, fear, and ambition, not to mention our endless capacity for self-deception. No wonder his hero, Fabrizio de Dongo, seems to know everything and nothing about himself. Even under fire at the Battle of Waterloo, the young Fabrizio has a tendency to lose himself in Napoleonic reverie:

Suddenly everyone galloped off. A few moments later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead, a ploughed field that seemed to be strangely in motion; the furrows were filled with water, and the wet ground that formed their crests was exploding into tiny black fragments flung three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed this odd effect as he passed; then his mind returned to daydreams of the Marshal's glory. He heard a sharp cry beside him: two hussars had fallen, riddled by bullets; and when he turned to look at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort.

The quote above, a famous one, captures something of Stendhal's headlong style. Until now, most English-speaking readers have experienced it via C.K. Scott-Moncrieff's superb 1925 translation. But now Richard Howard has modernized his predecessor's period touches, streamlined some of the fussier locutions, and generally given Stendhal his high-velocity due. The result is a timely version of a timeless masterpiece, which shouldn't need to be updated again until, oh, 2050. Crammed with life, lust, and verbal fireworks, The Charterhouse of Parma demonstrates the real truth of its creator's self-composed epitaph: "He lived. He wrote. He loved." --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

'The Charterhouse of Parma often contains a whole book in a single page... If is a masterpiece' Balzac 'What you find so much of in this novel - and in this new translation more than ever before - is, in a word, life' New York Times

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Picador (June 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330483978
• ISBN-13: 978-0330483971
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,829,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bliss, June 2, 2000

By 

Rafi Zabor (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (Modern Library) (Hardcover)

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.

43 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This novel should be regulated as an addictive substance, May 12, 1998

By 

Jeffrey R Galipeaux - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (World's Classics) (Paperback)

Can we make a better book today than The Charterhouse of Parma? No. Stendhal breaks rules right and left and is not always graceful, but the completeness of his fictional universe is staggering. Here is a man who could tell sweeping, epic stories in terms of minute personal expression, and tell them with humane wit. Funnier than James', unburrdened by Tolstoy's morality, more penetrating than Balzac's, and more approachable than Dostoyevsky's, Stendhal's literary universe is one of the most pleasing and evocative for the modern reader, and The Charterhouse of Parma is his masterpiece. Read this book, now!

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but avoid Howard, August 1, 2003

By 

A. Lowry (Madison, MS United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Charterhouse of Parma (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

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.