Belle du Seigneur (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

Albert Cohen (Author), David Coward (Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: April 1, 1998 | Series: Penguin Twentieth Century Classics

Set in Geneva in the 1930s, Albert Cohen's endlessly inventive satire of middle-class manners and ambition revolves around Solal, a man of remarkable gifts and disappointed ideals. As Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations, he has become disillusioned with a world dominated by personal and national interest. His one hope for redemption is through love, and he embarks on the seduction of the beautiful Ariane, wife of the dull-witted Adrien Deume, who works for Solal.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

First published in Paris in 1968, Belle du Seigneur is considered the masterpiece of Albert Cohen, a Jew who served the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel's first Prime Minister, and worked for the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees after World War II. This tortuous love story revolves around an adulterous affair between Sola, the ostentatious son of the Chief Rabbi of Cephalonia and Ariane d'Auble, a beautiful, blonde, Protestant aristocrat. Threatened by impending war and the growing anti-Semitism of Europe in the mid-1930s, the two struggle to keep passion alive. While Ariane molds herself into the perfection of femininity, Sola takes on a bitter cruelty that translates into revenge against the ostracism of himself and his people. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A vast, astonishing satire of modern life, Cohen's continuously digressive comic novel, set in Geneva in the 1930s, skewers, above all else, the emptiness of middle-class existence, its worship of power and money. Its antihero is Solal, Under-Secretary of the League of Nations, who risks his reputation over an obsessive love affair with the rebellious, bored wife of a pompous League official. Like Cohen himself, Solal is a Mediterranean Jew, an outsider. He mocks his own deep religious faith and expresses skepticism about the League's idealistic internationalism?which he nevertheless makes his personal mission. Tracing Solal's path, Cohen swings from slang to grandiloquence and pure stream-of-consciousness, mixing low farce, high comedy, rapturous erotica and acid satire on the rise of fascism. His gleefully observed gallery of fools exposes a catalogue of human failings?pretense, envy, snobbery, machismo, conformity?all typified by the man Solal cuckolds, Adrien Deume, a hypocritical, bigoted bureaucrat whose narrow-mindedness contrasts with the League's grand ambitions. Bumbling through this sprawling canvas, meanwhile, are "the Valiant," five picturesque cousins from Corfu whose Chaplinesque antics and open embrace of their Jewish roots counterpoint Solal's brooding. Cohen takes in his giant stride such themes as the psychological battlefield of marriage, humanity's bestiality beneath its civilized veneer, the persecution of Jews across the ages and the terrible brevity of each life. Readers of this magnificent conclusion to a trilogy that also includes Solal (1930) and Mangeclous (1938) will understand why, upon its publication in 1968 in France, it won the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman, and why it has gone on to sell more than one million copies in Europe alone.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 992 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Group (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140188711
• ISBN-13: 978-0140188714
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars THE story of love and life. The best 20th century novel. August 30, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, hard to forget this one! May 10, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sigh... February 3, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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!

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars THE ultimate love story July 16, 2000

By alienorhuman

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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)

5.0 out of 5 stars Great! September 4, 2010

By E. Hector Jones

Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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!

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dont be afraid... March 15, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars On the wings of love August 27, 1998

By [e-mail]

Format:Hardcover

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.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Beldam of Bedlam June 14, 2011

By Daniel Myers VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 more ›