Both works are easy reads and useful for catching the allusions of other writers like Wharton, Joyce, O'Neill ......etc, etc.

By the way, Cather is one of my favs. I particularly like The Professor's House for the way Cather induces physical as well as emotional responses in the reader.

Sorry to have been away for so long. I only intended a short break from Seniornet and the Net in general. I had an accident and am slowly recuperating (so please excuse typos!) It could have been much worse. Sub Specie Aeternitatis

I like the choices offered by everyone. I feel funny about making any suggestions at all since my posting may be limited. However, whatever work is selected, I can read, read, read!

Marvelle

Joan, I too read Kristin Lavransdatter in my "salad days" long ago and was entranced by the story of Kristin from birth to death and everything in between in 13th and 14th century Norway. I remember even now admiring the husband, Erlend was his name I think, and siding with him, but I can't recall what for. Three books came out in succession, The Bridal Wreath (Kransen) 1920; The Mistres of Husaby (Husfrue) 1921, and The Cross (Korset), 1922.

I have the Robert Pinsky translation of The Inferno , the first volume of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. It is glorious.

My liftetime of reading was self-directed, voracious but spotty. My late entry into college gave me some structure and the courage to read Ancient Literature in translation (too late in life to learn the Ancient Greek language!)

Suddenly I understood allusions in my favorite modern writers, allusions which had only confused and frustrated me earlier. Edith Wharton's House of Mirth has a section where the main character Lily is pursued by Furies. Wharton doesn't explain the Furies since it alludes to The Oresteia . (See Barnes & Noble description of the work in above heading)

A simple, short allusion, like the Furies, expands without effort the depth of a reader's ubderstanding, and adds layers of meaning to a work. Of course, someone like T.S. Eliot drives me crazy. His excessive allusions are a mix of classical lit, works of his contemporaries, and references that today are obscure! Another story. Maybe some expert on Eliot could do a group read of him sometime in the far distant future, but not a current book suggestion.

Marvelle

The Oresteia is a drama = the only extant trilogy of Greek drama, and consists of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides --- all those doomed denizens of the House of Atreus : Orestes, Iphiginia, Electra et alii . Remember Eugene O'Neill's take on this in his Mourning Becomes Electra .

Would we be reading the entire trilogy ?

The same question arises with the Inferno. That's the first part of The Divine Comedy , the others are Purgatory (Il Purgatorio) and Paradise (Il Paradiso) .

Would we read only The Inferno or the entire work ?

Not too long ago the fine Norvegian actress Liv Ulman set out to produce a film version of Kristin Lavransdatter , a story ovbviously very dear to her. Not being a movie buff, I have no idea whether that came to fruition.

KL is an epic story set in 13th and 14th century NORWAY ; the main protagonists are Kristin and Erlend. But there's much more than their love story (God and how I loved them both). Sigrid Undset (Nobel Prize 1928) was a convert to Catholicism, and that is reflected in this extraordinary tome.

I don't have the time to make suggestions now - why, my hospital bag isn't packed yet, but let me simply MENTION he following :

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) : The Metamorphosis, a novella, and the allegorical novels The Trial, The Castle ; and

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) : Death in Venice .

In great haste.

For The Oresteia, I suggest the trilogy which is equivalent to a fairly short to moderate length novel. The three parts work as one. Also, there are many lovely graphics on the Net that can enhance the reading!

A biography first of an author, especially our Willa? You betcha! I'm such a fan -- I have a framed 8x10 photo of her wearing an outrageously sumptuous fur coat, playing the journalist -- which she was -- by talking into one of those weird old fashined phones. I also have an art print that she originally gave to a friend of hers during the time Willa traveled in New Mexico on writer's research. The print is a subtle, disturbing critique of male-female positions in society. I don't know anything about the European (I believe) artist. Neither the print or photo are valuable, you understand, but they bring me closer to Willa!

A biography on any of the authors would be useful. With The Oresteia there could be perhaps a book/article on Greek theatre or Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

If reading Dante's Divine Comedy: I've read the 3 parts and -- I guess it's the devil in me -- I found Hell to be fascinating.

Marvelle

The book covers the events of just one day in the life of 3 people - and that's the only narrative sequence right there; tours of Dublin are matched by inward journeys with pages and pages of stream of consciousness wanderings full of stimuli and responses. Some passages are like a movie reel, naturalistic, taking note of the smallest detail from a newspaper ad to bodily functions (often in obscene terms - it was banned here until the early thirties). All of it is an exploration into language itself and contains slang of various origins.

Joyce said - and I don't have the exact quotation - that he put many puzzles in this book(which took him seven years to write) so that the academics would forever keep guessing as to the meaning, and he, Joyce, would thus be assured of immortality (!)

Speaking strictly for myself, I have to say 'been there, done that'; I don't want to revisit all the puzzlements and eternal searches. Vita brevis , life is short, and there are so many great books still to enjoy, most of them much more readily accessible than Ulysses.

Just my opinion.

PS. Now where is the suggestion box ?

PPS. Do the Archives contain a record of each and every book discussed here since the very beginning ? I wondered about that wheb Carol Shields' STONE DIARIES was mentioned elsewhere recently.

Lastly : Ooops -- The Iliad is mentioned twice in the header.

#1 is The Oresteia, a tale of murder, revenge, guilt, punishment, forgiveness, and justice. Wonderfully entertaining and a good follow-up to Crime & Punishment but an easy read, not sad, and with forgivenes as an added ingredient.

#2 is a harder choice. Personally, I love Don Q and Leopold Bloom, and dear, wooden Ahab and I re-read these books every year. But...great books yet less time-consuming -- Cather, Shaw, Eliot. Okay. my #2 is Mill on the Floss, a book I read ages ago, remember little except that I enjoyed it and would like to revisit that experience.

I'm willing to read whatever is chosen, however.

Marvelle

To ease the quandary in which we may find ourselves, would it help to briefly outline the perceived essence of some of the books ? May I try ?

1. The Oresteia ( 3 plays) and The Iliad need no further description. Joyce's Ulysses is, may I say, a semi-dependent companion as far as Greek mythology is concerned.

2. My Antonia, Mill on the Floss, and Moby Dick are home grown and do not need any further description either.

3. Dante's Inferno is in a class by itself. Pinsky's new verse translation is the latest and judged the best. The epic narrative contains XXXIV Cantos and runs to 373 pages. The Italian text is on the left, the English rendition is on the right. The introduction describes the various circles of Hell, and there are over 50 pages of notes in the back.

4. The Leopard is concerned with Italian history and specifically with the island of Sicily and its many transient conquerors through the ages, peoples' inevitabale accommodations to their rule, and at last the fierceloyalty to the House of the Bourbons just before Italian unification.

5. St. Joan is in a class by itself as a play.

6. So of course are Cervantes (1547-1616) and Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). He wrote of his time, and she wrote about medieval Norwegian history.

#1 The Oresteia

#2 Mill on the Floss

Marvelle

1. Kristin Lavransdatter

2. The Leopard

Since the vote is so close, may I mention once again that Kristin Lavransdatter is a trilogy and The Bridal Wreath is only the first volume (of 260-some pages). I don't know whether this will influence those who voted for Kristin L. before, but I thought it worth bringing up again in the interest of fairness.

My own vote remains unchanged.

Part of the delicious problem of choosing is Barbara's "The Leopard" suggestion. I checked out the links for book and author in Harold Bloom's "The Westen Canon" given in the heading. Now I'm hooked on reading that book! What a magnificent undertaking of the author, late in life, coming to peace with himself and his ancestors through the process of writing this novel. My grandparents were freed serfs and I've heard many stories of their near starvation once freed and kicked off the land. "The Leopard" is a chance to see what happened to the 'other side' following this social upheavel.

Now I've added this book to my list and have 3 books to consider in my final decision.

Marvelle

P.S. Just saw the 2 video set of "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" about turn of the century Italy and the life of 'owned' peasants. This Italian film won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and I highly recommend it. There was a movie made of "The Leopard" with -- I think -- Burt Lancaster. Don't know if its good. I tend to read a book first before I see the movie.

#2 Mill on the Floss

Marvelle

I do not believe that it is possible to do justice to this important work by discussing only the first volume, and I hereby withdraw my nomination.

Thanks loads.

This is a trilogy with

Volume I THE BRIDAL WREATH

Volume II THE MISTRESS OF HUSABY

Volume III THE CROSS

It is a historical novel set in 13th/14th century Norway and a moving, enduring love story. When I read it (in the German translation), I was no longer a wide-eyed impressionable teenager but in my first year at university---still impressionable of course. And I loved the book.

With special permission from the local library I was able to take out this trilogy, which is part of the library's special collection and not part of the circulating "stock". The English translation is by Charles Archer (with J.C. Scott for vol. I).

It was not my intention to throw in the towel - that's not like me. Rather, I feel that reading only ONE volume of a trilogy, ANY trilogy, or even a tetralogy, would/could not possibly provide a full picture of a respective book; by doing so we might be short-changing ourselves. Forgive me, but for me it's either everything or nothing; I don't believe in half-measures.

if it isn't too late, I will throw my hat in the ring once more for The Bridal Wreath, volume I of Kristin Lavransdatter.

Part of the distaste I felt with certain biographies is that the female author uses the subject, in this case Willa Cather, as a soapbox on which to stand and preach on gender, sexuality, politics -- ho hum. I'm not interested in her agenda even though I do like to support women authors. I'm interested in Willa Cather and not the biographer.

I do recommend "Willa Cather: A Literary Life" by James Woodress. B&N has it in paperback form -- hope I spelled Woodress correctly. Another book I like which isn't as readily available is "Willa Cather: A Critical Biography" by E. K. Brown and Leon Edel" Leon Edel did such a grand job with the life of Henry James and his writing is wonderful. I would like to read a biography before the novel but everything depends on the readability of the biography.

Marvelle

It's beginning to sound to me as if a book length bio may not satisfy although I'm willing to read whatever is on the agenda. What do we do now?

Marvelle

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My estimation is that Life of Greece will finish about that time and, based on past experience, folks will clamor to begin Durant's third volume, "Plato, Caesar, and Christ."

Robby

Marvelle

• Pickwick Papers 848
• Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford, 836
• The Mill on the Floss: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Contemporary Reactions Criticism 613
• Emma 512
• The Oresteia 335
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm 252
• Penguin Island by Anatole France 232
• The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, 217
• To the Lighthouse 209
• Saint Joan the Play in 6 Scenes with an Epilogue 163
• The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty 156
• The Master of Ballatrae by Stevenson 224 pages.
• A Christmas Carol 155

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NO. 2 is a harder choice, but my Scandinavian heritage is calling -- so that vote is for Undset.

#2. -- Golden Bowl

Robby

would now like to add Puddn'head Wilson as Second Choice.

The outcome should be interesting !!

T

Maryal, my Bethesda granddaughters' schools (Pyle & Bradley Hills) were closed Wednesday because of no power, although they had power at home. Have they determined yet what happened?

You found "Solitude's" author under Garcia because that is his true last name -- his father's last name (1st appellido). Marquez is his mother's last name, his (2nd appellido). His mother is Sra. Firstname Marquez de Garcia.

Marvelle

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Or if you all haven't read the Odyssey , we could read that first and then Joyce.

Marvelle

Marvelle

I've been offline for a long time due to systems malfunction. Now I have a used (but new to me) computer system which replaces my old webtv unit. After all this time I forgot my old password and had to re-register by adding a "4" to my name.

I've spent a lot of time reading and writing while offline and its been wonderful. I'm reading Joyce's Ulysses now - June 2004 is the one hundred year anniversary - so won't be available for the later discussion.

Marvelle

I've been reading a lot of the new books that've come out, the latest read was Paul Collins' memoir Not Even Wrong which I highly recommend. I've been relaxing in a comfortable patio chair, stacks of books around me - new issues, classics, my traditional yearly re-reads, nonfiction reference - as I whittle away at these 'to read' piles. One book leads to another, and another, and another .... bliss.

Marvelle

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Sixteen years? Hmmmm, how about 6 plays a year so that we'd have one month per play with a month's break inbetween? Then we'd be done in 6 years which is still a considerable commitment but worth the time. I'd even be willing for a play a month, if the rest of you prefer, but am worried about burnout for all of us.

.

As for the next Great Books discussion, I'll wait before voting as I like both selections.

Here's another idea about the Don. So many novelists have been inspired by this Great Book that it might be fun to first discuss Don Quijote and then the books that were inspired by it. I just finished reading the comic last novel of William Faulkner, The Reivers which definitely reminds me of Don Quijote. It may be the only comic writing of Faulkner but, like DQ, it is serious too.

Marvelle

We could bypass all that by taking things in chrono order or just having the DL choose. Individually, we wouldn't need to commit to participating in each Shakespeare discussion; just whatever and whenever we choose.

A play could be discussed for 3 weeks and then time off for 5 weeks; then another play - this would mean that we absolutely could not get overly excited and start adding extra things into the mix.

I won't push for a discussion on Shakespeare, however, as there must be such a discussion already going on somewhere on the internet. I'll check it out.

Marvelle

Bloom has been attacked by the new academics for his traditional choices for the Western Canon - Shakespeare, Cervantes etc and in his revised list he tried to be more "inclusive".

The attempt isn't completely successful in my opinion because the new academics are counting beans (how many women and minorities are listed) rather than judging on merits and which merely continues the same biased scenario for the Great White Male Books in the older canons. Bloom couldn't please them anyway. Hope he'll revise the list once again and select on merit.

I'm surprised at Marguerite Duras's choice (sorry Traude) and there are others.

Which choices disappointed you?

Marvelle

But the question may be, how far into darkness do we want to descend? We've been to the Inferno with Dante, where flames were licking at the feet of some miscreants and horrible punishment lay in store for other misbegotten sinners in the various treacherous circles of Hell.

We know that, simply put, there'll always be good people and bad, hyprocrites, saints and sinners; human nature is unchanged, amply described through the ages with wit, satire, even cynicism.

In this extremely hot summer, windmills are very much the subject du jour in these parts, and that's why I'd like to throw my hat into the ring, standing right next to ALF, in favor of the historical outlook. In fairness, the historical outlook would also include Balzac's Cousin Bette. Just MHO.

*The books we've discussed to date are in the heading of this discussion.

The rules? Hmmm...there's one that I can think of. The nominated title must be found in one of the three lists of Great Books to be found in the header of this discussion. We had to adopt this policy years ago...rather than subjectively decide (and argue) about what makes a great book a "Great Book. "These lists are the ones Marni is talking about when she notes the absence of Dumas Père.

From the link: "Dumas did not generally define himself as a black man, and there is not much evidence that he encountered overt racism during his life. However, his works were popular among the 19th-century African-Americans, partly because in The Count of Monte-Cristo, the falsely imprisoned Edmond Dantès, may be read as a parable of emancipation. In a shorter work, GEORGES (1843, George), Dumas examined the question of race and colonialism. The main character, a half-French mulatto, leaves Mauritius to be educated in France, and returns to avenge himself for the affronts he had suffered as a boy."

From the same link about The Black Tulip: "In 1850 appeared The Black Tulip, a romantic adventure set in the 17th century Holland. In the middle of the political struggle for freedom is Cornelius van Baerle, a young man who has devoted himself to tulip-growing. Cornelius is falsely imprisoned for high treason. With the help of Rosa, the daughter of a jailer, he manages to grow a black tulip. Cornelius wins his freedom and hundred thousand guilders in glittering gold pieces as reward for the tulip. 'This tulip,' continued the Prince, 'will therefore bear the name of its producer, and figure in the catalogue under the title, Tulipa nigra Rosa Barlaensis, because of the name Van Baerle, which will henceforth be the name of this damsel'."

Marvelle

His books don't belong in the "Great" category but very nice all the same when you want a ripping read.

Marvelle

It was popular in Italy and, thanks to traveling companies, throughout Europe for several centuries. It began when professional theatrical companies included in their repertoire a new form of comedy characterized by improvisation on a bare outline ( scenario ), and the use of stock characters, some wearing masks, who combined features of the learned and the poular drama.

It is this testing of the actors' virtuosity and skill that gave the genre its name, not an association with a professional craft or guild.

Among the enduring stock characters in the commedia dell'arte were an ingenue with a name like Julia or Lucinda,
her lover, handsome and impecunious, sometimes named Octavio,
Pantalone, a Venetian merchant, wealthy but foolish,
the doctor, sometimes called Graziano, a hopeless pedant,
a braggart captain, later called Scaramuccia,
and an assortment of servants to provide anything from sparkling wit to acrobatics as they move in and out of the story, sometimes helping, other times hindering the affairs of their masters and mistresses.

The oldest of the wily or blundering manservants is Zanni (a dialect version of Gianni or Giovanni); the word was later used to designate the whole troupe of comedians. Later variations of the type included
Arlecchino, or Harlequin, famous for his patched costume, sometimes called Truffaldino or Mezzetino;
Tartaglia, noted for his eyeglasses and comic stuttering;
Brighella, the companion of Arlecchino;
and the ever-hungry Pulcinella, who speaks in Neapolitan dialect and has an enormous nose. The character survives in the Punch and Judy shows of the puppet theater.

The commedia dell'arte strongly influenced the development of European comedy and of individual playwrights, such as Molière, Goldoni and Gozzi.

Robby

Robby

"Barchester Towers (1857) is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire, the work in which, after a ten years' apprenticeship, Trollope finally found his distinctive voice. In this his most popular novel, the chronicler continues the story of Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor, begun in The Warden, adding to his cast of characters that oily symbol of 'progress' Mr. Slope, the hen-pecked Dr. Proudie, and the amiable and breezy Stanhope family."

Unfortunately, after a rousing beginning, some of the characters progressed into the belief that Communism would be the cure to their problems.
Sorry, Zola, it didn't work out for Communism.
Perhaps others would enjoy this novel, anyway, but it's on the back burner for me, after the plot took that turn.

I hope this comment is not considered a "spoiler," but Amazon and other reviews gave too little indication of what the novel covered.

Good idea, Joan!
I need some Shakespeare to be running through my mind,
but it isn't easy to do it without motivation.
Not a nomination:
My current favorite Shakespeare is Othello, because of the wonderful opera by Verdi.

All four are terrific choices!

Click this Graphic to Vote -
Be sure to scroll down and vote for second choice too!
Vote for two different titles!

Robby

SOMERVILLE It's a quiet night at The Thirsty Scholar, an Irish pub and dating bar on Beacon Street. A handful of bored-looking guys sit at the bar, watching a hockey game on the TV, and a few couples and small groups chat quietly at scattered tables. But in what Irish pubs call "the snug," an alcove off the dimly lit main room, conversation is animated, laughter frequent, and there are more books than bottles on the table. The Boston-area "Finnegans Wake" Reading Group is in session.

The 10-year-old group, which meets weekly, is carefully making its way word by word, line by line, and page by page through James Joyce's famously difficult final work. The book is 628 pages long, and they're now on Page 251. "The `Wake' is an enigma, but something new comes out each time we meet," says Erik Jespersen of Somerville, a multimedia consultant and a composer who is an original member of the group.

There is no agreement on what "Finnegans Wake" is really about, and its language, much of it invented by Joyce, is so convoluted and peculiar that most people find it unreadable. For true Joyceans, however, the challenge is its own reward, and Jespersen doesn't consider the group's pace usually a page or less each meeting unduly slow.

"After all, it took Joyce 17 years to write it," he notes.

The title is a reference to a popular comic song of Joyce's day about a hard-drinking hod carrier named Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder, cracks his skull, and is presumed dead until, at his riotous wake, whiskey gets splashed on the corpse, which miraculously revives. It can also be read as "Finn Again Wakes," an allusion to Finn MacCool, the warrior giant of Irish mythology who sleeps in a cave deep beneath the earth but will awake to save Ireland in her hour of greatest need.

The book is full of puns and riddles ("punns and reedles" to Joyce), words derived from more than 60 languages and dialects, and a lot of Shakespearean and classical allusions, along with references to popular songs, old jokes, and children's games. There are many humorous plays on words. St. Paul's First Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, becomes "farced epistol to the highbruws." In one chapter there are more than 100 references to rivers around the world including one in "New Hunshire" called "The Merrymake."

"I really enjoy the wordplay and the analyzing that we do," says Richard Cosma, 64, of Framingham, an early member of the group. Cosma's copy of the "Wake" is a ragged paperback with the date he started reading it penciled on the flyleaf: May 9, 1997. An engineer at a pharmaceutical company, he says he also likes that the book group's far-ranging discussions are "180 degrees from what I do during the day."

Because of its density, Joyceans recommend reading it aloud and in a group with diverse backgrounds and knowledge, in order to get the most out of it. The sentence rhythms sometimes mimic songs, for one thing, and while a scholar might identify a Sanskrit word an avid fisherman would be the one to recognize the name of an obscure trout fly, an enthusiastic gardener an exotic plant.

The pages the local group has most recently been reading include allusions to a prepubescent playground game in which boys try to guess the color of girls' underwear, apparent references to Galileo ("Galilleotto" ) and Machiavelli ("Smachiavelluti"), and a typical Joyce rewriting of a famous Shakespearian line: "For a burning would is come to dance inane."

Joel Reisman, a Veterans Administration statistician from Newton, thinks too many "Finnegans Wake" readers get caught up in the details of its language and miss the narrative sweep of the book. "Every passage has its ambiguities, but this is still a story," he says.

And not all of it is barely comprehensible. `About once a chapter Joyce writes clearly and lyrically and I love that," says Todd Sjoblom of Brookline, a computer programmer with a doctorate in linguistics.

The group attracts serious readers. Sjoblom belongs to two other reading groups, and Cosma says he's usually working on three books at a time. He was initially drawn to the "Finnegans Wake" group, he recalls, "because I'd read almost everything else."

Reisman joined the group only last December but has no problem keeping up. "The book is cyclical, so you can start anywhere," he says. Uniquely structured, "Finnegans Wake" begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. Joyce described it as "a Book of Doublends Jined."

There are usually four or five people at a meeting, says Jespersen, "but we've had as many as 10." The group is currently all male, mostly in their 40s, but has included a few women.

The group seems to be the only one of its kind meeting regularly in Massachusetts, possibly in all of New England. The Finnegans Wake Society of New York, founded before World War II, has links on its website to reading groups in Belgium, Switzerland, and Ireland but only to nine others in the United States outside of New York and Boston, most affiliated with colleges or universities.

The New York society meets monthly at the Gotham Book Mart, a Manhattan literary landmark. "We usually get 20 to 30 people," says society president Murray Gross, a retired attorney. The society has been working on its present reading for more than eight years, Gross says, and is now on page 295. "When we're finished we'll start all over again and get it right," he jokes.

Cosma says his group likes to meet in pubs since Joyce spent a lot of time in them, and in Cambridge or Somerville because they feel less conspicuous there. "We come from all around Boston, but this is a Cambridge kind of thing."

The first meetings were in an Irish restaurant and bar near Porter Square in Cambridge actually called Finnegans Wake. "It was really wonderful to be reading "Finnegans Wake" in Finnegans Wake," remembers Jespersen. When Finnegans Wake closed, replaced by an Asian fusion restaurant, the book group had to move on and on. "It was hard to find a bar that would put up with people who were there to read, not drink," Cosma says. Lighting was also a problem. "One place was really dark to make it more romantic," he recalls, "and we had to tip the waitress to bring us a stronger bulb so we could see what we were reading."

The Thirsty Scholar, where they now meet every Tuesday night from 7 to 9, has been more accommodating. The snug has adjustable lighting, and the management lets the group keep a large dictionary, essential for finding the meaning of Joyce's many arcane words, on a shelf by the bar. "You know you're dealing with hard-core Joyce guys when they keep a dictionary in their pub!" Cosma says.

Since the "Wake" is a book that has no real beginning or end, the group doesn't anticipate ever dissolving. Asked if he thought it possible that 10 years from now the same people would still be meeting in a pub to deconstruct "Finnegans Wake," Sjoblom thought a moment and then smiled. "If not us," he said, "people very like us will be."

Who knows what commodius vicus of recirculation might find me back at Howth Castle agin?

Yers,
Sir Tristam

Moby Dick is highly overrated, IMHO, but there must be a reason it's a classic; I could not
finish it when I tried to re-read it this past summer.

Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer. He is known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology and for the dryness of his writing-style. He is considered one of the foremost and earliest practitioners of the realistic form, and his most famous novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).

"The famous C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation for Modern Library was first published in 1926. Margaret R.B. Shaw's 1953 translation for Penguin reads like a translation of an 18th century novel."

* Barnes & Noble Classics, translated by Horace B. Samuel, with an Intro and Notes by Bruce Robbins. The print does not seem too small. It's a good sized book - 532 pages. (Happy to have you with us, Marni! Promise to go slowly!)

Norton Critical Edition translated by Robert M Adams, 1969. The print is not all that easy to read but the essays are worth the effort. (Yes! Gum will be with us!)

New Translation by Burton Raffel - this translation seems to be the rage. Mippy writes that her Raffel copy came yesterday. Happy that Mippy plans to join us - another from Island in the Center. Will let you know what she says about the size of the font. A review I read about the Raffel -

"The new translation by Burton Raffel rocks. Or, more precisely, it's a blast, which is exactly how Raffel (a distinguished professor of humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who has also dragged Balzac's old warhorse, Père Goriot, kicking and screaming into the 21st century)"

The Norton Critical Edition for Don Quixote was Raffel's. I was put off by his attempts to "drag Don Quixote" into the 21st century - putting idioms into the Don's mouth that Cervantes never wrote. We had Amparo with us, reading in Cervante's Spanish - and she would let us know when Raffel took such liberties.

This time, we'll have Eloise with us - reading the French and the English. Raffel won't slip much by us in his effort to modernize Stendhal. I've heard that he captures Stendhal's spirited expression - so that's a real plus.

The good news is the price for this hardback from B&N: $5.98 !

"...no attempt has been made to pretend that this is a book of modern English prose.

Reading inevitably involves more or less active interpretation by the reader; and a translation is a stronger act of interpretation because its results will coerce subsequent readers. It must interpret, and limit, at the basic level: words, ordinary words, like "bien" for example, often do not have one single, simple, 'faithful' meaning. Choices between the feeling, nuance and emphasis of a series of synonyms in a particular context, or between varying syntactical structures, etc., have to be made sentence after sentence - and the reader ignorant of the original language is thus shut off from the hovering possibilities and alternatives that might suggest themselves to someone who knows the language.

In an ideal world the translator would be one who was conscious of this, and who was also native in both French and English, loved and understood Stendhal, was steeped in the literature of both countries in the early nineteenth century, had the ear and the gift of pastiche, and an active conscience.

However, in the absence of most of these qualities, I have acted on my impression that one of the pleasures in reading the translation of a classic, comes from hearing behind it the ghost of the original language. Probably the best model of an appropriate English manner is not a translation at all, but Robert Louis Stevenson's very subtly French narrator in his unfinished novel about a French adventurer in England, "St. Ives" (1897).

So, when given the choice, I have lent towards a fairly literal, hard rendering of Stendhal's syntax and vocabulary, keeping close to the somewhat informal and conversational tone of the original while nevertheless, I hope, making the sense lively enough, and natural. 'Naturalness in manner and speech' was Stendhal's professed ideal, as opposed, perhaps, to the cultivation of a fine style. And in contrast to most modern translation, I have kept to the original, French, method of marking off speech and internal speech. Stendhal very occasionally uses inverted commas when a phrase already in the text is repeated or cited from the past, but that is his only use of them. To indicate the beginning of a speech said out loud a dash - is used, most usually at the start of a new paragraph: otherwise he relied on one's sense of what is going on, plus the repeated use of prompt phrases such as 'he said to himself', etc., bounded by commas. I have followed this exactly, with the addition of one or two dashes.

It might be expected that the result would confuse a modern reader of English by its density and unfamiliarity, but the effect is in practice, I think, to produce a swifter, less formal narrative flow which easily engages the reader's active collaboration because it refrains from breaking up the rhythm and tidying up the text with constant quotation marks (which would tend to enforce a tiny pause on each, frequent, occasion). Also the text looks more authentic.

The same feeling has led me to stick, on the whole, and when they are easily comprehensible to the English reader, to the original titles and honorifices, etc. - Comte, Duc, Abbe, and so on - though sometimes it has seemed preferable to translate them. ~ "Notes on the Text and Translation" from "The Red and the Black"

Also included are Chronology of the life of Henri Marie Beyle [Stendhal], Introduction, Selected further reading, and Notes on the text and translation. I have always found these very interesting and helpful while reading other novels.

One reason I have enjoyed Penguin Classics is that in other books they have also included the original pen and ink drawings.