Search Results

“... And yet Waterloo never assumed epic proportions in the British imagination. While Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal and Tolstoy grappled with the meaning of Napoleon, Thackeray gave the world Vanity Fair, Wellington released his table-talk, and Thomas Cook gathered another party of tourists for a trip across the Channel. For some reason, Anglophone culture has often ...”

“... journalistic-novelistic illustration of ready-formed social messages. A generation or so earlier, Stendhal and Balzac were the ones who had all the historical luck. Born into the moment of revolution and flux, they lived and wrote out their times. It sounds good, so far as it goes. But the thing is that Stendhal, who had ...”

“... and at times brilliant work, came packaged as the first ‘non-fiction novel’, as if Dreiser and Stendhal had never existed. And one might add that it wasn’t altogether a new mode even for Capote himself. The writer’s first published work, which appeared in the Mobile Press Register when he was 10, was a prize-winning short story, ‘Old Mr ...”

“... naturally. Luckier writers know the worst before they put pen to paper. The late starters like Stendhal and Proust don’t need to court experience in this way: Dostoevsky has already faced the firing-squad and endured Siberia; Conrad has seen enough of men in action to be able to sit scribbling in Kent for the rest of his days. Kennaway, by contrast, had ...”

“... Malcolm Dean supplies a personal memoir, while John Spurling discusses Farrell’s relations with Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry, and, by reproducing Farrell’s notes, indicates the general course the story was to have taken. Margaret Drabble writes on the comic undercutting, at their most solemn moments, of Farrell’s characters ...”

“... of the human paradox involved: he is a good and gallant young man, but that is how things are. Stendhal, Conrad, Musil go on to make the same demonstration in their different ways. The evidence, as in the case of the Marquise’s inexplicable pregnancy, or Lord Jim’s leap, is incontrovertible: the facts are plain – it is the role of fiction to add all ...”

“... unpleasant: he was a habitué of high society, and seems to have had many distinguished friends. Stendhal rather unkindly used him as the model for Octave, the hero of Armance, whose impotence complicates his love-life; and on the appearance of La Russie en 1839, Balzac withdrew the dedication to Custine in Le Colonel Chabert, fearing repercussions for his ...”

“... novel is bound to be as processed as spray-on cheese. What makes a narrative come alive is the Stendhal touch, a flick of the tail that propels the reader up past the rapids to a pool where things haven’t happened yet and Waterloo is just a place name. Alison MacLeod’s new novel sets out to defamiliarise almost the opposite situation, an inevitable ...”

“... then in some of the basic facts of both of Radiguet’s novels we see the parentage of Balzac or Stendhal or Flaubert: the young amorous hero, the older married woman, the demolishing of illusions, the inexorability of failure. And so perhaps this way of making sense of Radiguet’s fiction rests on a false division. His novels were published in 1923 and ...”

“... about aspects of John’s professional life that I should have spoken about: his translations – Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Proust, Georges Perec and several others. Or his books: on structuralism, on autobiography; the guide to the Pyrenees. But then he hasn’t been there to advise me. Letters I was very sad to learn of John’s passing. The loss of another ...”

“... called Caroline (‘You are my Proserpine of summer’); The Poet has luxurious thoughts about Stendhal or Leonardo (‘Leonardo is much to blame/For fixing the equivocal’) and travels to Lake Como or France or Venice (‘A mauve trauergondel off San Michele’). If this fails, The Poet can always enter an old poem: I know, my love, I’ve preached at ...”

“... bravely suggests, that ‘for Solal, Cohen has the same mix of affect ion and ridicule which Stendhal showed for Julien Sorel.’ There is a sense that Cohen knows much of Solal’s posturing is absurd, but it’s absurd only because it makes manifest life’s absurdity. It is offered to us as a form of clarity and courage, a willingness to take ...”

“... theme by another’s book. One particular sentence from The English Patient, where Ondaatje echoes Stendhal – ‘A novel is like a mirror walking down a road’ – might well stand as a motto for After Hannibal. This not only for what it says about how self-conscious we now are about realism, but also because it’s an echo of an echo, and thus typical of ...”

“... facts could not be relied on: ‘Henry Brulard’ – as artificial a concoction as ‘Stendhal’ – claimed that he thought of writing his life-story at a suitably picturesque place on a gloriously sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged ...”

“... the genius to breed a race of divinities, which generated the most serious style in art (as Stendhal thought it). The enduring imaginative virility in the tradition, eventually to be identified as Romantic, laboured down the centuries under the burden of Raphaelite convention. Sincerity itself had to labour under it. Reynolds’s discovery that if he ...”