ŷ������

“Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.��

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn't until I read Lessing's The Golden Notebook that The Red and the Black became high up on my radar. Lessing described this book as being one which fully encapsulated what it was like to live in France under the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830). I was curious.

What I got was the story of a poor provincial man working his way up in the world through a combination of intelligence, hard work, and deception. Julien Sorel knows he has to hide his true self and play a role if he is to get ahead, and this is a major theme of the book: the parts people play for their self-serving ambitions. Julien also secretly harbours strong Bonapartist sympathies, dreaming of what could have been had Napoleon still been in power.

If this sounds at all dry, it is not. Probably because a large chunk of the book is taken up by Julien's tantalizingly illicit relationships-- first with the married Mme de Renal, whose husband is enough of a raging misogynist to make her cheating seem somewhat acceptable, and later with the Marquis's daughter. Stendhal manages to make secret hand-holding surprisingly thrilling and every slight feeling unbelievably dramatic.

Of course, the situation with Mme de Renal couldn't last and it is when Julien joins the seminary in Besançon that the book is at its slowest. It picks up again when he goes to live with Marquis de la Mole and begins running errands for the monarchists.

It's a pretty tragic book that paints a dire picture of, if not the human race, then at least those living in France in the early 19th century. I found it interesting that The Red and the Black is considered the first "psychological novel" because books before it concerned themselves with depicting the actions and words of characters, but not their inner workings and thoughts. This latter is so commonplace these days that it never occurred to me there could have been a time when it wasn't done.

|