The Charterhouse of Parma

I have a soft spot for Lowell Bair's translation (in Bantam Classics), but Mauldon's is about as good, maybe better. She catches Stendhal's insouciance and tempo wonderfully, and is more careful than Howard's Modern Library version. Of the old Penguin, the less said the better -- I've not seen the new Penguin, but I doubt very much it's better than Mauldon's. (Pearson's intro, like the one for the Oxford "Red & the Black" -- also a fine translation, by Catherine Slater -- is good too.)

Hard to say whether Charterhouse or Red & Black is better; lately I lean to Red & Black (get Catherine Slater's Oxford translation; shun the new B. Raffel paraphrase). The fun of reading Stendhal, I think, is his narration; one briefly feels as clever, as observant, as clear-headed, as the narrator.The Modern Library has apparently decided that, with so many good Stendhal translations out there (Slater; Mauldin's Charterhouse; the NEW Penguin R & B; Lowell Bair's Charterhouse), it has a duty to provide bad ones. Richard Howard's translation has errors that even my schoolboy French can pick up. The New Criterion (which may have its own bones to pick w/ Mr. Howard, true) listed a great many flaws in his command of the French. And he's tone deaf to Stendhal in many of my favorite passages (not as bad as the old Shaw Penguins, but bad enough). If you read Howard's Stendhal & think you don't like him, try a better translation.

'Charterhouse' is seemingly a very different novel from Stendhal's previous masterpiece, 'the Red and the Black'. where the earlier book used the style of an Alexander Dumas adventure story to ironise its static hero, Fabrice del Dongo does go through some exciting adventures - fighting in Waterloo, embroiled in a grubby duel, escaping from an 'impossible' prison-fortress - not all of which are essentially ridiculous.The dilemma, however, is the same - an anachronistic hero, dreaming of great, chivalric deeds, is forced to collude with a mundane, self-interested, materialistic, middle-class dominated society, and is ultimately compromised by it. But where Julien Sorel was the compelling dark centre of his novel, Fabrice is often absent from his, his fate being decided by the lengthy machinations of others (although the rare decisions he finally takes tend to smash through the most intricate Machiavellianism).Whereas Julien was surrounded by a generally pallid supporting cast, 'Charterhouse' bursts with extraordinary, larger-than-life characters - the beatiful Gina, arguably the real hero of the novel, disastrously in love with her nephew; her middle-aged lover Mosca (the same age as Stendhal!), Prime minister of Parma, tyrannical politician and wonderful man; the Prince, spoilt, vain, paranoid, murderously capricious; as well as republican-poets, deformed actors and a gallery of unforgettable minor characters.Stendhal is the most beloved of 19th century writers because he eschews pedantic detail and description in favour of narrative momentum and the provisional expression of feeling and responses to experience (it is easy to see why Proust loves him). The rush, the joy, the hyperbole, the unpredictability of plot and style all match Fabrice's headlong character, and yet there is an in-built melancholy and critique largely unavailable to the hero. The brilliant translation captures the thrill and deceptive ease of Stendhal's art (especially compared to the stumbling Penguin one); while Roger Pearson's beautiful Introduction is quite simply the best I have ever read, alive to the serious profundity of the book, but ultimately affirming its transcendent power.

I'm a longtime fan of this wonderful novel which until recently almost no one seemed to read. There is nothing like it in the whole of literature, and the good reader is exhilirated and refreshed by the blast of Stendhal's sustained burst of inspiration: done in six and a half weeks and he lopped off the last 150 pages at the publisher's request (and realized his mistake but couldn't find the sheets: keep looking, folks). New readers are advised to plow through the first 50 pages, which are just as good as the rest of the book but from which it is very difficult to catch the book's unique tone; the great set-piece of the Battle of Waterloo will set you straight. I'm not sure that the vaunted new Richard Howard translation is better than the reliable old waddle of the Penguin, but that might just be my hankering for a familiar flavor. But what a book! Bliss to read it, and the Duchessa Sanseverina might well be the most magnificent woman in the whole of literature; she's certainly the only woman of such stature in 19th century fiction who doesn't have to pay the price for it by a suicide in the last chapter. Much of the book's inimitable energy derives from the enjambment of a whole range of incompatibles: a story out of renaissance Italy set in post-Napoleonic times; characters simultaneously seen from the perspective of great worldly experience and that of an enthusiastic adolescence conceiving them as larger than life (Mosca and the Duchessa primarily, but also demi-villains like the Prince and the hilarious Rassi); and so on. Fabrizio is a dashing cipher, is occasionally idiotic, the very archetype of impassioned inexperience. All right, Clelia Conti is irredeemably dull in a book suffused by the Duchessa's nearly superhuman radiance, but her stint as the bird-woman of the Farnese Tower raises to the pitch of inspired looniness Stendhal's sense of the world as a place in which all essential thought and emotion are sentenced to a fugitive life and an interminable series of codes and disguises. Fabrizio's terror of engaging with his auntie the Duchessa generates the subsequent phantasmagoria of prisons, intrigues, revolutions; and yet the tone is that of some crazed, inspired operetta, the characters speak in recitative, and the multiple ironies of character and tale serve not to distance us from life, as our modern irony usually does, but to embrace an astounding range of living contradictions. A last one such: notice that despite the utter scarcity of physical description, the sensory world comes to you crystal clear, vivid as can be. Major magic working here. The book is a source of joy for anyone who enters it whole, and nothing this side of Shakespeare is as bracing. I'm so glad it's being taken up and read again.

Can we make a better book today than The Charterhouse of Parma? No. Stendhal breaks rules right and left and is not always graceful, but the completeness of his fictional universe is staggering. Here is a man who could tell sweeping, epic stories in terms of minute personal expression, and tell them with humane wit. Funnier than James', unburrdened by Tolstoy's morality, more penetrating than Balzac's, and more approachable than Dostoyevsky's, Stendhal's literary universe is one of the most pleasing and evocative for the modern reader, and The Charterhouse of Parma is his masterpiece. Read this book, now!