About the book:
Ambitious young Julien Sorel navigates love, class, and power in post-Napoleonic France in this gripping tale of passion and hypocrisy.
A cornerstone of realist fiction and psychological depth.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Mild shelf wear.
Age related tanning to pages.
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About the author:
Stendhal (1783 to 1842)
Born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, France, in 1783, Stendhal grew up in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era that followed. He lost his beloved mother young and chafed under a stern father and a reactionary clerical tutor, developing an early hatred of hypocrisy, provincial narrowness, and the Restorations return to old hierarchies. A fervent admirer of Napoleon, he served in the French army during the Italian campaigns and later in the administration, experiences that instilled in him a lifelong passion for Italy, energy, and the pursuit of happiness. After Napoleons fall, he lived as a restless expatriate in Milan and Paris, observing the post-revolutionary scramble for power and status with a sharp, disillusioned eye.
His early success came with travel books, biographies, and literary criticism (notably Racine and Shakespeare), but it was the novels of his maturity that secured his reputation. In works such as The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Stendhal perfected a style of cool, analytical prose that laid bare the inner lives of his characterstheir ambitions, passions, calculations, and self-deceptionswhile dissecting the social machinery of ambition and class. He called his approach crystallization (the transformation of ordinary perception by desire) and wrote with a speed and irony that made psychology itself dramatic.
Deeply influenced by the Enlightenment rationalists, the energy of Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance, the psychological acuity of Montaigne, and the political upheavals of his time, Stendhal in turn became a crucial bridge between Romanticism and realism. He profoundly influenced Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky (who praised his psychological depth), Henry James, and later modernist writers such as André Gide and Albert Camus. His focus on individual consciousness, social critique, and the conflict between passion and hypocrisy helped shape the modern psychological novel.
Recurring preoccupations include the clash between individual energy and societal hypocrisy, the nature of love and ambition, the psychology of power and resentment, the gap between illusion and reality, and the search for authenticity in a world of masks. The Red and the Black offers a ruthless chronicle of a talented young mans rise and fall in Restoration France; The Charterhouse of Parma delivers a panoramic yet intimate portrait of Italian politics, love, and intrigue; both remain masterpieces of ironic observation and emotional precision.
Dogged by poor health (likely syphilis) and financial worries, Stendhal spent his final years as French consul in Civitavecchia while continuing to write. He died suddenly in Paris on March 23, 1842, after collapsing in the street. Largely underappreciated in his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily in the decades after his death.
Stendhals influence on world literature is immense: he helped invent the psychological novel and the literature of critical realism, capturing the drama of inner life and social climbing with unmatched clarity and irony while remaining utterly unique in his blend of passion, skepticism, and lucid intelligence.
