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stephchem's review against another edition
2.0
Honestly not a fan. Didn't like the writing style. Couldn't relate to the characters. And quite honestly there wasn't much of a plot
neilers17's review against another edition
5.0
James is the master of psychological perception and their interplay with human relationships. The Ambassadors is excellent for its ability to make the reader feel that squi is not getting the full story without being able to arrive at the backstory. I imagine you might be better able to guess what is going on behind closed doors in this one than I was, but I like to let the story come to me most of the time.
In any case, I found this novel to be very well crafted and filled with fascinating and complex characters. Vintage Henry James. You do feel bad for poor Strether; high society in Paris is just too complicated for him.
More: http://ahabsquest.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/review-the-ambassadors/
In any case, I found this novel to be very well crafted and filled with fascinating and complex characters. Vintage Henry James. You do feel bad for poor Strether; high society in Paris is just too complicated for him.
More: http://ahabsquest.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/review-the-ambassadors/
readerrider's review against another edition
2.0
didn't finish. why is James at times so adverse to clarity? lots of words, little being communicated. even the characters admit they don't know what's being said or what's going on .
franklekens's review against another edition
5.0
Two printing errors in the first chapter, one of which is glaring and one of which is treacherous, making an already difficult sentence incomprehensible: this doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the text, I'm switching to a different edition.
Pity, the accompanying apparatus (notes, introduction, bibliography) is worthwhile -- even if probably not entirely up to date. But which edition's is?
Pity, the accompanying apparatus (notes, introduction, bibliography) is worthwhile -- even if probably not entirely up to date. But which edition's is?
ihavequalities's review against another edition
3.0
You know what I loved about this book? Gostrey. You know what I thought was 'meh'? Everything else. Classics aren't really my jam, I picked this up in Thailand, and I probably only finished it because I'm traveling. It has some nice scenes and turns if phrase, but I did not enjoy all the narration and exposition.
donato's review against another edition
5.0
What would you do if you hit mid-life, en plein crise, with the realization that you hadn't really lived your life up until then, and you had to opportunity to finally live it? To get a second chance, to expiate your sins, to take things as they come (rather than as they don't come), to recreate yourself, and to end your "dreadful cheerful sociable solitude"?
If your answer is "Let me think about it", then you're a character in a Henry James novel; a character who is put into "relations" with other characters ("types"), studying their "cases", finding "connexions", having "impressions", "coming out" -- all in the name of creating a "fictive picture" [1]; a picture, however, which is indistinguishable from reality.
Here, for example, is our poor friend Lambert Strether [2] at the theatre in London with a new relation, having one of his impressions: "...it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage...the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true..." (Project Gutenberg edition, so just search for the text [3]). He's been penetrated by art (and so will you be) because it's the same as life.
That quote is also a nice display of James's style (which was hard for me to get into at first): opaque [4] and allusive; everything seems to be described through metaphor, simile. In my notes I wrote that it was like a stifling blanket; beautifully made, but impeding freedom, openness. The language is... well, I think only Henry James writes like this: it's like... embroidery, language looping, connective juxtapositions, invented phrases that are not only "beautiful", but somehow carry meaning. At first you're like, what? And then you're like, ohhhh. Oh yes, it's all so wonderful, splendid, and magnificent! [5]
So what would you do if you were an ambassador of the ideal and you realized that your mission was much more complicated than you thought, that the supposed ideal was the opposite of life? To make a moral choice or not to make a moral choice. But what is a moral choice? What is right? That is the question.
And so, in the end, like Strether "living out" a painting [6] just before his unexpected but of course expected scène à faire, we realize that, no, we are not a character in a novel, we are human, and we are free.
UPDATE 1: I must admit that this book that I at first found annoying keeps coming back, like the waves coming up onto the beach. It contains depths, like the ocean, despite what might seem like "meagre material", information held back, kept hidden, secret. One of these things that keeps coming back is how the character of Mrs. Newsome is fully realized despite the fact that she neither appears nor speaks in the entire novel. She's always there, though, watching, her "fine cold thought" permeating the air.
UPDATE 2: I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars. Because of those waves from Update 1, and because good books need better ratings on this site.
[1] In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode quotes James's preface to Portrait of a Lady, approving of Turgenev's idea of the "origin of the fictive picture" as coming from character, not from story (pg 75).
[2] Lewis Lambert Strether (as in that "awfully bad" Balzac novel), what a telling mouthful of a name.
[3] The Ambassadors
[4] Kermode would of course remind us that this is not a bad thing; in fact, a necessary thing.
[5] Of course Eliot said it better than I ever could (not talking about Henry James). Here's Kermode quoting Eliot: "...a quality Eliot always praised: ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations’, allowing a fusion in a single phrase of ‘two or more diverse impressions’..." (Eliot and the Shudder) Examples: "long slow rush", "crowded empty expensive day", "picnic on a coral strand", "monstrous alien altars", "smothered in flowers", "interpretive innocence".
[6] "The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it."
If your answer is "Let me think about it", then you're a character in a Henry James novel; a character who is put into "relations" with other characters ("types"), studying their "cases", finding "connexions", having "impressions", "coming out" -- all in the name of creating a "fictive picture" [1]; a picture, however, which is indistinguishable from reality.
Here, for example, is our poor friend Lambert Strether [2] at the theatre in London with a new relation, having one of his impressions: "...it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage...the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true..." (Project Gutenberg edition, so just search for the text [3]). He's been penetrated by art (and so will you be) because it's the same as life.
That quote is also a nice display of James's style (which was hard for me to get into at first): opaque [4] and allusive; everything seems to be described through metaphor, simile. In my notes I wrote that it was like a stifling blanket; beautifully made, but impeding freedom, openness. The language is... well, I think only Henry James writes like this: it's like... embroidery, language looping, connective juxtapositions, invented phrases that are not only "beautiful", but somehow carry meaning. At first you're like, what? And then you're like, ohhhh. Oh yes, it's all so wonderful, splendid, and magnificent! [5]
So what would you do if you were an ambassador of the ideal and you realized that your mission was much more complicated than you thought, that the supposed ideal was the opposite of life? To make a moral choice or not to make a moral choice. But what is a moral choice? What is right? That is the question.
And so, in the end, like Strether "living out" a painting [6] just before his unexpected but of course expected scène à faire, we realize that, no, we are not a character in a novel, we are human, and we are free.
UPDATE 1: I must admit that this book that I at first found annoying keeps coming back, like the waves coming up onto the beach. It contains depths, like the ocean, despite what might seem like "meagre material", information held back, kept hidden, secret. One of these things that keeps coming back is how the character of Mrs. Newsome is fully realized despite the fact that she neither appears nor speaks in the entire novel. She's always there, though, watching, her "fine cold thought" permeating the air.
UPDATE 2: I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars. Because of those waves from Update 1, and because good books need better ratings on this site.
[1] In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode quotes James's preface to Portrait of a Lady, approving of Turgenev's idea of the "origin of the fictive picture" as coming from character, not from story (pg 75).
[2] Lewis Lambert Strether (as in that "awfully bad" Balzac novel), what a telling mouthful of a name.
[3] The Ambassadors
[4] Kermode would of course remind us that this is not a bad thing; in fact, a necessary thing.
[5] Of course Eliot said it better than I ever could (not talking about Henry James). Here's Kermode quoting Eliot: "...a quality Eliot always praised: ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations’, allowing a fusion in a single phrase of ‘two or more diverse impressions’..." (Eliot and the Shudder) Examples: "long slow rush", "crowded empty expensive day", "picnic on a coral strand", "monstrous alien altars", "smothered in flowers", "interpretive innocence".
[6] "The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it."
timostler's review against another edition
2.0
Having first been profoundly disappointed by The Europeans, whose crude amateurishness I found genuinely shocking, I thought I would see if later James could validate his reputation for me. At first I found it enjoyable and engrossing, but gradually the total lack of emotional resonance made it something of a slow torture to continue. From a lit-crit standpoint I did find resonances -- many of them -- from the obvious resemblance to Proust, only in the third person, to a hint of Kafka in the almost paranoid effect on Strether of the various Europeans' machinations. Indeed it is arguably the willful lack of resonance that perhaps provides it with its modernist credentials. I find myself comparing it with atonal music: a deliberate application of organizational principles that squeeze the emotional life out of an artifact but nevertheless generate critical interest amongst an alienated intellectual elite.
I don't want to appear too cynical however, I still feel it may pay me to return to this book; but my first reading, in the demands it placed upon me to concentrate upon every nuance of a sentence in order to puzzle out the meaning then find that I did not care what it was was above all like reading a particularly unrewarding set of Terms & Conditions.
I don't want to appear too cynical however, I still feel it may pay me to return to this book; but my first reading, in the demands it placed upon me to concentrate upon every nuance of a sentence in order to puzzle out the meaning then find that I did not care what it was was above all like reading a particularly unrewarding set of Terms & Conditions.
monkeelino's review against another edition
4.0
“It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflexion.”To say this might be somewhat of an understatement, in the manner of stating such introductions, would be to present Lewis Lambert Strether, our main character in search of the ideal, within the distinct lattice of James’s prose stylings which are replete with enough prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses to sublimate the already sublimated emotional and psychological complexities of his narrative. Jamesian sentences, like the one I just attempted, sometimes require a reverse tracing by the eyes just to re-identify the subject or verb. And yet, there is a strange kind of delight in parsing his style. It carries a kind of modernist formality that matches the tight class circles and intricate psyches his characters inhabit.
Strether has been sent to France by his fiancée to retrieve her adult son, whom everyone believes to be disgracing himself with an untoward woman. Chad, the son, is to return to the U.S., be married in advantageous fashion, and take his rightful place in the family business. What follows is a novel of unsettled expectations, as the charms of France and European culture work against Strether’s mission and shifting alliances obscure just whom to trust.
Regularly required to report back on his progress by post, much of his writing, as well as replies from back home are never shared directly with the reader. What we get is a man perpetually reflecting on his reflections.
“He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message… ”Intermixed with his reflections are a host of comical and commiserating characters. Miss Gostrey, with whom he strikes up quite a memorable friendship from the start, proves to be a pure delight, and the one character in the novel who forces direct questions upon Strether, rarely lets him off the hook. The denser prose sections are offset by rather fun and engaging exchanges of dialogue. Gostrey often provides droll and keen insights, such as commenting after Strether sings another man’s praises:
“Any man's nice when he's in love.”This is not so much a novel of action and occurrences as it is one of tensions and impressions. Strether views Paris through a romanticized lens, seeing himself cast in a type of drama, too often still feeling like a passive roleplayer, but one who has inevitably ended up on the other side of the stage from whence he entered:
“He was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course—him too a modest retreat awaited.”
(Incidentally, although I like James, I mainly read this in order to more properly appreciate Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies. I’m glad I did even if I never get to the Ozick book.)
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WORDS & PHRASES I LEARNED WHILE READING THIS BOOK
bêtise | circumjacent | ficelle | fuliginous | matutinal | gewgaws | Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat | porte-cochere | troisieme | entresol | Quoi donc | ouvreuse | tout betement | cicerone | et panem et circenses | cher confrere | ces gens-la | Allez donc voir! | fiacre | vieille sagesse | salle-a-manger | banlieue | cariole | côtelette de veau à l'oseille | invraisemblance