Customer Reviews

Les Liaisons dangereuses (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Choderlos de Laclos' epistolary novel has been made into at least three film versions, but none of them come nearly up to the real thing. Laclos' story of evil and depravity, starring a pair of jaded aristocrats so satanic we wonder if they have a human bone in their bodies, is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, novels of the 18th century. In a nutshell, it revolves around the cynical plot to seduce and destroy the reputation of a young girl fresh out of her convent, which they plan and achieve with the icy calm and cynical detachment of a pair of mathematicians solving a calculus problem.

The anti-hero and anti-heroine of this book, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquis de Merteuil, fascinate and repel us at once by their sheer wickedness. Valmont is a depraved Casanova, lay-em-and-leave-em, who has lost count of all the broken hearts and destroyed characters he has left in his wake. The Marquise de Merteuil, married and widowed too young, has combined shrewd intelligence with appalling powers of deception to engage a string of lovers whom she uses and casts off at random. Somehow these two find each other and form an unholy partnership. When the book opens, their affair is already spent, but they have remained friends; and the Marquise is infuriated when she learns she is about to be dumped by her current lover, a rich aristocrat named Gercourt, who is about to marry Cecile de Volanges, the most naive teenager who ever emerged from the protective cocoon of convent education. Her main attraction, for him, is her virginity, and it is this the Marquise wants Valmont to do away with so that Gercourt will find out on his wedding night that he didn't get the innocent virgin he was expecting, but an already corrupted young woman, and will become the laughing stock of Paris.

Seducing and abandoning an innocent girl is an old story to Valmont, but he has more pressing concerns; he is hopelessly in love with a young married woman, Madame de Tourvel, whose virtue seems impregnable. And here he appears as more sympathetic and human than the Marquise; even if he's trying to seduce a married woman, he, at least, is capable of love; something which is beyond the Marquise, who sees other people as nothing more or less than objects to be used or cast aside. It's only when he finds out that Cecile's mother has been telling Madame de Tourvel his scandalous life history that he decides to seduce Cecile, to pay back the mother for messing in his business. At the same time, he perseveres in his pursuit of Madame de Tourvel. But just at the point of victory, the Marquise turns his very strength, his ability to love, into a weakness; she uses it as a weapon against him to make him think his love for Madame de Tourvel is contempible. At this point, we see the real conflict in the book, Valmont against the Marquise. But Valmont, as cynical and jaded as he is, is no match for this lady; her very emotional detachment makes her unassailable. Valmont doesn't have a chance. He's not only destroyed the Madame de Tourvel, he's also destroyed himself. It looks like the Marquise is the sole victor in this combat. But is she? Fatally, the Marquise has forgotten that letters can be dangerous weapons, and she's written a few too many. What goes around comes around.

Laclos's book caused a sensation in its own time that reverberated for decades afterward; 40 years after its publication it was condemned by a criminal court and publicly incinerated in a mass book-burning ceremony. If Laclos had still been alive then, they might have wanted to toss him on top of the pyre. Whatever feelings the book may have aroused when it was written, it has endured for two hundred years since as a masterpiece of literature in any language. Any book that has been the basis of three different films, each unique from the other, has to be saying something to modern readers. Laclos' book says a great deal and says it magnificently.

I purchased the Oxford Classic edition of Les Liasons, translated by Douglas Parmee, and much to my chagrin, found the text to be riddled with poor writing and literary anachronisms.

Parmee may be accurately transliterating the French original; I of course cannot read it. But the book he has produced borders on the unreadable. Cecile, an aristocratic French girl of 15, speaks like a besotted 60-year old English gentleman. "Fortunately Mummy's feeling much better today and Madame de Marteuil is coming with the Chevalier Danceny and somebody else but she never comes until late and when you're all alone for such a long time, it gets jolly boring." (pg. 32) Yes, you read that right, "jolly boring." In Parmee's translation, Cecile uses "jolly" quite often, but somehow I cannot imagine a beautiful if naive French girl ever saying "jolly" anything.

Also gone is the tense sophistication of the Vicomte and the Marquise's dialogs in the movie--in its stead it seems that Parmee has elected to give them the voices of two American High School students, void of all intelligence, charm and wit, leaving them with just enough arrogant cunning to move the plot. Throughout all the letters, there are a great deal of run-on sentences which require a great deal of effort to understand, a characteristic of bad writing.

I've read a few pages of the Lièvre translation and can plainly see that it is much improved. I recommend you purchase that version and leave this one well alone, as I plan to do.

This is probably my favourite classic novel of all time and deserves more than 5 stars. When I read it I was totaly blown away by it's genius. The Christoper Hampton play is excellent and the film based on it "Dangerous Liasons" is also very good, but the novel is even better. Which is unusual since it's when a film version is made that the story really comes alive for the reader not the other way round. The way it is written as a collection of what seems like real life letters revealing a scandal, that have been passed around members of society and finaly published makes you feel almost a part of the story. Being about a page and half long each, they are as if designed to read on the bus or tube despite being written in 1792!. It is very easy to pick up and put down again without losing the thread of the story. Laclos seems to know exactly how to pace and order the letters to maintain maximum interest and suspense from the beginning right through to the very end allowing the story to unfold at exactly the right moment. And even though I was very familiar with the plot I still never knew quite was going to happen next. The plot is remarkable and very famous so I wont go into it, but if you like it the novel is a must.

Along with L'Assommoir by Zola and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, Choderlos de Laclos's masterpiece ranks as one of my favorite books of all time. To fully appreciate the genius of the letter writing form,one must understand that the libertine novels of the 18th century all utilized this format. Laclos admittedly set out to write a book that would depart from other works of the century to leave a dramatic imprint on the world, and he succeeded. While written in the same lingusitic and seductive style of a libertine novel, Laclos transforms the limited and mundane scope of the libertine world into a riveting classic. Each character reflects a different conception of "love" and how the libertine world can go awry when true sentiment is confused with lust. La Marquise de Merteuil reflects the purest degree of libertinage. In perhaps the most spellbinding of all the letters, she explains to Valmont her duplictious conduct after her husband's death to obtain her reputation among men and place herself at the forefront of society's attention. In contrast, Mlle. de Tourvel is the epitome of sentimental love, to the point that she can become physically ill if it is not reciprocated. Clearly what separates this work from other romance novels of the 18th century, elevating it to the level of other world masterpieces, is the character of Valmont. He is the heart and soul of this novel in every way possible. One one hand, Valmont is extremely self-assured in his ways, when describing his calculating, rational strategy in courting naive young ladies. On the other hand, he refuses to accept the reality evidenced by his relationship with Mme. de Tourvel that he is not the manipulative libertine that he, and society, consider him to be. The deep struggle within Valmont between his true feelings and his vanity in preserving his reputation of libertinage is perhaps the most compelling storyline in the novel- because it is physcological and under the surface. At this level, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is often compared to "Crime and Punishment". les Liaisons is more subtle in its physcological dimension in that the reader must form her own conclusions about Valmont's physchosis whereas Raskelnikov's mental state is at the heart of the prose. If I have not convinved everyone yet to go ahead and experience the magic of Laclos (who fortuneatley survived the Terror), then I have failed in my task...

What I love about this book, aside from the fact that it maintains a voyeuristic appeal through its epistolary form, is that it is cerebrally sexual.
Laclos' language is gorgeous and his subtlety is sublime. The book is wildly sexual but never crass or disgusting.
Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont are the absolute paragons of villainy you will love to hate.
The book is at its simplest level a study of the total destruction of naivete and innocence, but you can be sure that just desserts will be served all around.
A fantastic novel...if only de Laclos had written more!
Also, the movie version starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich is wonderful as well--but of course, I recommend reading the novel first.

This novel was one of the most witty and cynical that I have ever read. De Laclos has a gift for capturing the voices of his depraved characters. His voice was especially strong with the Marquise De Merteuil.

The basic story-line was a pair of depraved aristocrats plot against a young innocent convent girl and a righteous woman and find that their plot has deadly consequences. It is like nothing I had never read before, since it was completely in letter format. I must admit that I normally use to the typical prose format that most novels are in. But reading the letters was wonderful and it made it feel intimate; as if you were really getting into the minds of the characters. Valmont and Merteil were both so vicious but strangely charming and your heart does go out to Tourvel and Danceny; the only figures in the book that truly do believe in love.

Overall, this book was such a pleasure to read and I highly recommend reading it with dark chocolates around.

The writing style which Laclos employed in writing this book is unlike any other book I have read and provides an interesting break in the usual style of which other authors write. I enjoyed the story-line he created and varied personalities he gave to his characters. Overall, it is a book that is very worth-while and gutsy. I would recommend this book, although, to people that have a broad view and can handle suggestive material--a "pg-13" book.

Any translation is going to be less than the original if the writer of the original had any skill with words. Laclos wrote extremely well, so it is inevitable that an English translation runs the risk of being heavy-handed in comparison with the original text. Alas, this translation is indeed a lesser production. But, despite that fact, it's worth reading unless you can come by a better version. Two hundred years ago the epistolary novel was all the rage (in English, Richardon's Pamela was the non plus ultra of the genre, though many including myself far prefer Fielding). Laclos' work stands head and shoulders above all other epistolary novels in any European language. Not only is the device, in his hands, quite believable but the human observation is far more acute and true to life than anything else being written at that time. Far from echoing the conventions of plot and character typical of his era, Laclos writes what he knows to be true. And this is the novel's enduring appeal.

The heart of the story is essentially an emotional chess game played by two well-matched adversaries who formerly were, briefly, lovers. The Marquise de Merteuil, an older woman, is playing against the Vicomte de Valmont, a dashing younger rake. Laclos brilliantly enables us to see the intrinsic egoism of both protagonists and at the same time their emptiness and frailty. Even as Valmont seems to be moving smoothly from one conquest to another, Merteuil is playing his own ego against him, exploiting a weakness he simply doesn't see until too late. Merteuil exhorts Valmont to seduce the most faithful woman in France, telling him that it will be his ultimate triumph. And Valmont, like a proud and vain little boy, does just that - but in the process comes to a vague awareness that this woman (the Madame de Tourvel) can offer him something far greater than a living sheath for his rampant organ. He glimpses an adumbration of true love. Merteuil detects this from his letters and of course is threatened to her core. She gave Valmont only her skills as a seductress; Tourvel could give him so much more. So Merteuil plays her finest move: she plays on Valmont's enormous ego to persuade him to break Tourvel's heart and thus prove himself to be the ultimate rake. Valmont, lacking sufficient emotional resources to be his own man at this crucial point, does as he is bid - and then realizes that he's thrown away the only thing that really mattered in his entire life.

The sub-plots are satisfying and the characters are finely drawn. There are moments of cruel humor and even bawdy pathos, though such a thing sounds improbable in the abstract. The denouement is as awful as it is inevitable, and Merteuil is left the meaningless victor of a game in which all the pieces have been smashed beyond redemption.

This is not a book to appeal to those who want fantasies about human nature, or who require happy endings. But for anyone interested in a surgical examination of human foibles and the degree to which self-deception can go, this is a must-read. And for anyone who can read French, of course it's so much better to go to the original than to have to wade through a fairly insipid translation.

Now like most folks I sort of remember the film adaptation ("Dangerous Liaisons") as a vaguely enjoyable but stuffy costume drama. When some years ago a fellow seated next to me on a plane said "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" was the best book he has ever read I thought I'd give it a try. Well I finally got around to reading it. While it is decidedly NOT the best book ever it does have its moments.

The story involves a scheming pair of former lovers sharing their designs on capturing and destroying hearts of innocents around them. I can see when this book was written over two hundred years ago it caused a great scandal. While not explicit in language it leaves little doubt as to what is transpiring. Just when our nasty duo get close to capturing their prey everything unravels in an unexpected way (..no spoilers here).

Since the story is told in a sequence of over one hundred letters between the characters I'd imagine most folks would find this format to be a major turn-off. Admittedly the first half of the book is a bit tedious. However the second half is quite engrossing, making this book well worth the effort.


Bottom line: a unique book worthy of its reputation. Recommended.

This stunning novel about the Vicmonte de Valmont and theMarquise de Merteuil's adventure in attempting to lure a pure heartedgirl into bed; is incredibly well written and exhillirating to read.In a story of lies, deceit, and sex; it is impossible to be boredreading this epistocple work of literature. The plot twists and theending may seem unbelieveable, but still has you convinced. I howeverwould probably recommend a different version than the Oxford one.