Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Paperback]

Peirre Choderlos de Laclos (Author), Ernest Dowson (Translator), Alfred Mac Adam (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2005

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Peirre Choderlos de Laclos, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

Love . . . sex . . . seduction. Of the three, only the last matters. Love is a meaningless word, and sex an ephemeral pleasure, but seduction is an amusing game in which victory means power and the ability to humiliate one’s enemies and revel with one’s friends. So it is for the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, two supremely bored aristocrats during the final years before the French Revolution. Together they concoct a wildly wicked wager: If Valmont can successfully seduce the virtuous wife of a government official, Madame de Tourvel, then Madame Merteuil will sleep with him again. But Madame Merteuil also wants Valmont to conquer the young and innocent former convent schoolgirl, Cécile Volanges. Can he do both?

When Les Liaisons Dangereuses was first published in 1782, it both scandalized and titillated the aristocracy it was aimed against, who publicly denounced it and privately devoured it. Today we still recognize its relevance, for what could be more contemporary than its appalling image of everyday evil — small, selfish, manipulative, and mean.

 

Alfred Mac Adam, Professor at Barnard College–Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Christopher Hampton's brilliant adaptation...gives a pitiless and searching portrait of the erotic diversions of aristocrats in putrescent pre-revolutionary France." --Daily Telegraph

"Hampton's achievement is to have preserved the satanic magnetism of the twin conspirators while going all out for social comedy. But this is comedy of the highest theatrical kind: edged with danger, replete with pain and forever reminding us that lives are being ruined with the flick of a well-turned phrase." --Guardian

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (July 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593082401
• ISBN-13: 978-1593082406
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #664,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars and you thought WE were wicked...., March 16, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) (Hardcover)

Many people have seen one of several movie productions of this book and assumed that it is a modern story that has taken the 18th century as its setting. In fact, the book was written at that time, and it provides a shocking, thrilling, sexy window into the lives of the french aristocracy. It is a thing of beauty. The exploits of the central characters make your average daytime soap opera look tame, and it is all done with a cunning and an evil grace that went out of style with the french revolution. Language is used as an aphrodesiac, a lever, and occasionally a cudgel, and since the book takes the form of the published letters of the main characters we hear it straight from the pens of those involved. "Les Liasons Dangereuses" will make you mourn the invention of the telephone. Such skill with the written word! The double meaning was king, with muddied intentions as its queen. Read this book: you really must. If you love language it will become a favorite of yours, just as it did for me.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of manipulation (and an excellent translation), April 9, 2003

By 

Erik Kowal (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

When I read Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (which retains its French title in the 1961 English translation by P W K Stone), I found myself amazed and thrilled by its absolute excellence of execution. Its energy and spirit, and the seductive and machiavellian - perhaps even diabolical - undertones which whisper throughout the work, urge the reader ever onwards in the best page-turning tradition. It is possibly not for nothing that the book itself was eventually decreed 'dangerous' by French officials a full 42 years after it first appeared, long after it might have been expected to have lost its ability to shock. Even if you have seen the films "Dangerous Liaisons" (dir. Steven Frears) or "Valmont" (dir. Milos Forman) based on the book - and whether or not you liked them - this is an outstandingly good novel which is beautifully served by the precise and graceful prose of its translator, whose subtle range of diction manages to convey the tones and tempers of the characters most convincingly. The written story's chief virtues - a compelling narrative drive, and a skill in characterisation which permit some superbly-observed insights - easily withstand comparison with the screen versions; even today, when we are so fully exposed to the diverse secrets of the psychiatrist's confessional and the details of all the world's vicissitudes and miseries, it would be hard to improve on their portrayal here in print.

The book succeeds so well for many reasons. Some of its appeal to a sophisticated (or at least blasé) modern audience is, I believe, the multi-layered cynicism of its vainglorious but not unattractive main characters and rivals, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte (viscount) de Valmont, a reminder that profound deceit is not the sole prerogative of the post-industrial era. Part of the reader's amusement is to observe how their egotism - by far the most easily-wounded of their sensibilities - is also an exercise in the deception of themselves as well as of all those with whom they have dealings. Equally, their wily scheming and duplicity simultaneously appal the reader while also appealing to any secret desire he might himself harbour to exercise his or her own will with equal freedom and with equal heedlessness of conscience or consequences, thus planting a distinct ambivalence in his breast. This effect is augmented by the shifting first-person narrative, a device which gives the voices of its protagonists an intimate (and often touching) immediacy and multiplies the scope for irony by giving the reader a consistently better view than the characters, to which the skilful interweaving of the sub-plots also contributes. I should mention that the novel is written entirely as a sequence of letters. This format was common in the 18th century when the book was written, but its relative rarity in modern fiction makes its appearance today refreshing. That it is overtly concerned with the sexual seduction of the weak by the strong partially disguises the fact that it is also a philosophical novel whose themes would easily form the subject of more general discussion. As a depiction of the relations between individual human beings, it is, to be sure, a study of calculating spiritual emptiness, but one which does not shy from laying bare the catastrophic consequences of the conspirators on their victims, just as the report of a war correspondent might describe in detail the horror of a bomb explosion in a hospital. "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" not only contains plenty of anguish on the part of its characters and an affecting deathbed scene, but the reader's own emotions are made to oscillate intensely throughout from amusement to arousal, from curiosity to incredulity, from admiration to dismay... all thanks to the superb manipulation of Laclos, whose mastery of both narrative and reader is absolute and, perhaps, somewhat unsettling. (But how I wish he had written more!)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, August 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

I'm 13 and the reason I bought the book was that I LOVED the movie. I was worried by the fact that it was written in letters but after the first few pages I was completely taken in by it. Dracula was written similarly in letters - but the letters were more descriptive than personal. In the bookwe get in a very close insight into the characters. The true emotions of the characters are conveyed. The conflict of the Presidente's emotions and the tragedy and irony of the Marquise are put across beautifully. A work of art- buy it.