Stendhal - Hardcover

Keates

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786704128 ISBN 13: 9780786704125

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 1997

Synopsis

A biography of the nineteenth-century French novelist follows his childhood, his career in Napoleon's armies, his love affairs, and his diplomatic postings

About this title

Reviews

Henri Beyle (1783-1842), writing under the pen name Stendhal, was one of the great French novelists of the 19th century, along with Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. He entered the civil service through family connections and kept that employment through ability and political agility. Despite the focus on love and seduction in his works, he was neither a rape-prone Julien Sorel nor a seduction-prone Fabrice del Dongo, and reserved his self-destructive impulses and, in later years, his romantic forays for his diary and the pages of his novels. In this unpretentious and well-written biography, Keates (Purcell, LJ 11/1/96) integrates Beyle's chronology with the history and background of his various sites of service, particularly the dull Italian port of Civitavecchia. Still, it is helpful if readers already know the history and indispensable that they have read his greatest works, The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black. For literature collections.?Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Perhaps because of the daunting complexity of his life and work, no one has attempted a serious biography of Stendhal in 20 years, despite important advances in scholarship on this towering figure. The wait has been worth it. Keates gives us the man complete--romantic, restless, generous, mercurial, brilliant, and astonishingly versatile. On the battlefields of Castelfranco and Borisov, in the villas and concert halls of Italy, in the salons and boudoirs of France, we see Stendhal cut his swathe of real-life romance and adventure. But it is in tracing the novelist's growing powers to create an engrossing world of fiction that Keates spends his best efforts. From grade-school exercises to the last journal scribblings, the reader shares in the unfolding of the probing imagination that gave us The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, masterpieces of psychological realism. A triumph of literary scholarship, this volume deserves its place alongside Stendhal's great novels. Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786704128
• ISBN 13: 9780786704125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480