Stendahl: The Red and the Black

Not only does this book come highly recommended by Ward's Lifetime of Reading (a schedule that, with this book, takes me into its 8th year), but it also was consistently urged on me by my literature professor turned friend C.K. Pellow.  If I had approached this book with no more expectation than I had brought to Flaubert, I might have been pleasantly surprised.  Weighed down, though, as I was with such a buildup, I found myself more than a little dissapointed. 


Stendahl's language is marvelous, and there are enough epigrammatic little moments to thoroughly justify the reading, my favorite of which is:


"Mind-made love is of course subtler than true love, but its moments of enthusiasm are limited: it understands itself too well; it is always evaluating, passing judgement" (341).


Perhaps it is for this reason that I found the book beneath my expectations.  Amour de tete, as Stendahl puts it, is all I've ever experienced in my life.  Perhaps the love story held in these pages is beyond my understanding, and people really do behave in these utterly unfathomable ways.  Perhaps Stendahl has painted a masterfully honest picture of something that I cannot grasp.  Whatever the cause, however, I found the characters to be inconsistent, the plot unneccesarily delicate, and the book in general to be thematically unexceptional.  It is not a complement when I say that I think it would make a fine movie.