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betsygant's review against another edition
3.0
Truly, I wish I could learn to enjoy the "stream of consciousness" style; however, James navigated this type of writing remarkably well comparatively. I appreciated the inner reflection and internal conflict within Strether. I think we all at some point in our lives experience the isolation and the condition of alienation from a society not designed for us. This feeling of aloofness and yet a simultaneous desire to fit in causes a greater feeling of being an outsider. And yet, I think we are created to have this juxtaposition of feelings for a more spiritual reason. Looking forward to reading more psychological commentaries within novels by Henry James!
christinemark's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
This book!!!! The concept of it is great, but James's writing is just sooo dense. I found it reaaally hard to get through this, this only reason why I finished it is because I had a presentation on it. Would not reccommend to anyone who struggles with slow books.
It was originally published as a series and it shows, nothing much happens in it and it progresses really, really slowly. It takes a lot of patience to finish this. The voices of the characters sort of blend together, so that you don't really know who's talking, and for this reason I would reccommend the audiobook if you're going to venture into this one!
It was originally published as a series and it shows, nothing much happens in it and it progresses really, really slowly. It takes a lot of patience to finish this. The voices of the characters sort of blend together, so that you don't really know who's talking, and for this reason I would reccommend the audiobook if you're going to venture into this one!
bookmarkhoarder's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
wmhenrymorris's review against another edition
Not for the inexperienced reader of Henry James. In fact, only attempt if you've already made it through Portrait of Lady, The Bostonians, and even The Golden Bowl.
This is a finely tuned novel. It also requires a certain acceptance of premises (whole scenes take place inside the thought processes of the main character Strether rather than providing us with the actual conversation). But there's no better exploration of American idealism meeting European cosmopolitanism and both crashing against the hardness of American propriety and prosperity.
This is a finely tuned novel. It also requires a certain acceptance of premises (whole scenes take place inside the thought processes of the main character Strether rather than providing us with the actual conversation). But there's no better exploration of American idealism meeting European cosmopolitanism and both crashing against the hardness of American propriety and prosperity.
motobass4321's review against another edition
4.0
At first I was put off by the circumlocutions, elaborations, extremely complex sentence structures, somewhat dated vocabulary of the novel. I found that I had read entire sentences and paragraphs and had no idea what was meant to be conveyed. Rereading those sentences and paragraphs I did better, but not always. This at least, was my experience at the start. After having made it to the midway point of the novel or so, that problem largely went away and it was not the complexity of the language that was difficult, it was the complexity of the society and psychologies of the characters and the evaluative paths taken by Lambert Strether that were the by far larger challenge. Dialogue between the characters was elevated and sometimes sounded artificial, but the goals of the conversations were complex themselves and ruled by laws of tact, that if not possible to state, were certainly felt.
We have, for an initial situation, an American group centered in, and metonymically represented by, Woollett (Massachusetts). A wealthy, socially powerful, head-of-family widow wishes her son Chadwick to return and take over the family business. Chad is presumed to be living a "horrible" life in Paris, probably captured by a money-grubbing woman, and ignoring his duties to his family. He has been there for five years already and no longer writes home. The widow sends her presumed (or actual, I am not sure) fiancé over to retrieve him. This person is Lewis Lambert Strether - a widower himself. He is, to the misfortune as it were, unsuited to this task because he actually cares to find out the truth about Chad's situation and whether he has in fact been corrupted by his time in Europe. Paris in particular is seen by the Americans as corrupting. It is clear that if he fails to bring Chad back his anticipated marriage into the family will be impossible.
James is a master of tracing the reasoning and the felt experiences of Strether as he comes to see and take in Chad and his Parisian circle. Chad is in the best imaginable company - in the sense that everyone appears to be impossibly highly refined.
Robert Pippin's [b:Henry James and Modern Moral Life|363792|Henry James and Modern Moral Life|Robert B. Pippin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403182267s/363792.jpg|353862] has a chapter on this novel that brings out the problem of how moral judgements on one's own life and others' lives are created and shared and inextricably bound to the modern problem of the loss of apparent grounds for doing so. If the simple, negative judgement of Chad cannot and does not change for those that remain true to Woollett, that is tied to their unwillingness to see him - his life as actually lived, what he means to others, how he is in his relation to others, and in what sense his being in Paris, with these people has "improved" him.
Strether goes through multiple positions in relation to Chad and to the acceptance of what that means for him: sacrificing his anticipated future, etc. There are many more, well-developed and sympathetic and less sympathetic characters. This novel is one of James' late-period masterpieces, so I read, and having just finished it, I am curious how much it will stick with me. As the Pippin book makes clear, James' writings reward careful consideration of his characters and themes - of how we create ourselves with others, how and on what basis we understand and morally evaluate our lives and those of others, what are the social and historical sources we rely on and how successful are they? etc. I highly recommend it and must read more by Henry James.
I read this as part of a Back to the Classics Challenge for 2017, in the category of 20th century classic.
We have, for an initial situation, an American group centered in, and metonymically represented by, Woollett (Massachusetts). A wealthy, socially powerful, head-of-family widow wishes her son Chadwick to return and take over the family business. Chad is presumed to be living a "horrible" life in Paris, probably captured by a money-grubbing woman, and ignoring his duties to his family. He has been there for five years already and no longer writes home. The widow sends her presumed (or actual, I am not sure) fiancé over to retrieve him. This person is Lewis Lambert Strether - a widower himself. He is, to the misfortune as it were, unsuited to this task because he actually cares to find out the truth about Chad's situation and whether he has in fact been corrupted by his time in Europe. Paris in particular is seen by the Americans as corrupting. It is clear that if he fails to bring Chad back his anticipated marriage into the family will be impossible.
James is a master of tracing the reasoning and the felt experiences of Strether as he comes to see and take in Chad and his Parisian circle. Chad is in the best imaginable company - in the sense that everyone appears to be impossibly highly refined.
Robert Pippin's [b:Henry James and Modern Moral Life|363792|Henry James and Modern Moral Life|Robert B. Pippin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403182267s/363792.jpg|353862] has a chapter on this novel that brings out the problem of how moral judgements on one's own life and others' lives are created and shared and inextricably bound to the modern problem of the loss of apparent grounds for doing so. If the simple, negative judgement of Chad cannot and does not change for those that remain true to Woollett, that is tied to their unwillingness to see him - his life as actually lived, what he means to others, how he is in his relation to others, and in what sense his being in Paris, with these people has "improved" him.
Strether goes through multiple positions in relation to Chad and to the acceptance of what that means for him: sacrificing his anticipated future, etc. There are many more, well-developed and sympathetic and less sympathetic characters. This novel is one of James' late-period masterpieces, so I read, and having just finished it, I am curious how much it will stick with me. As the Pippin book makes clear, James' writings reward careful consideration of his characters and themes - of how we create ourselves with others, how and on what basis we understand and morally evaluate our lives and those of others, what are the social and historical sources we rely on and how successful are they? etc. I highly recommend it and must read more by Henry James.
I read this as part of a Back to the Classics Challenge for 2017, in the category of 20th century classic.
annacwick's review against another edition
2.0
I just can't get into Henry James. But I gave it a go. The stories and characters just didn't capture me in this one. I am going to give Washington Square a try at some point, maybe I will like it better.
magicandmystery's review against another edition
2.0
I thought I liked this book, but by the end I decided I didn't. Book 18 was The Amabassadors by Henry James. It follows Lambert Strether as he journeys to Paris to rescue his wealthy fiance's son from a supposed liason with an unsavory women. When Strether arrives in Paris he is overwhelmed by the beauty and the character of its citizens. Hailing from Woollet, Massachuesetts where things are decidedly more repressed, he loses himself to experiencing life for the first time.
I liked the theme which was about living life to the fullest and getting everything you possibly can out of it, but by the end I decided that the book came off as a bit pretentious. Here's a quote about the theme of life:
"It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what HAVE you had?"
This book was apparently inspired in Henry James by overhearing someone say somthing very similar at a garden party. I like that idea, but what I didn't like was the vague references by Strether's guide to Paris of something deep that only they got. I understood that they saw beauty, life, happiness, that they communicated beyond the formal ways of being in Woollet but after hearing so many vague references to it by the end I wanted to shake the characters and say, "oh shut up!!!" Take this for example:
"That means simply that you've recognized me--which is rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am"
"To be as good as you and me, but different"
This is one quote that I do like and if the book, hadn't driven the point home so many times I may enjoyed the book.
"What I've seen so often spoiled' she pursued, 'is the happy attitude of faith and what shall I call it? The sense of beauty".
Lambert Strether doesn't go crazy with freedom away from his fiance, who controls his entire life having all the money, but in the end it is hinted that he may have lost even her by experiencing real life.
"I don't get drunk, I don't pursue the ladies, I don't spend money I don't even write sonnets. But nevertheless I am making up late for what I didnt' have early."
In Strether's mind (and I will give him this point) it was worth it to throw everything away to just experience life in its rawest form. I agree with him there, because I do think that life is meant to be lived. People who are fully alive inspire a great sense of joy and awe in me and make me happy and calm, just as they did to Strether. I am hopeful however that I don't come across as too selfish or silly, because, in the end, I think I found everything that Strether did to be a tad bit too selfish. His enjoyment of life wasn't something that could be maintained, and was only a bit of an escape from reality. People who can find joy with or with out money, with or without comfort, with or without the inspiring sights of Paris are the ones who really experience life.
The next book I am working on his Book 19-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So far I am enjoying it as a story, but not much more than that.
I liked the theme which was about living life to the fullest and getting everything you possibly can out of it, but by the end I decided that the book came off as a bit pretentious. Here's a quote about the theme of life:
"It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what HAVE you had?"
This book was apparently inspired in Henry James by overhearing someone say somthing very similar at a garden party. I like that idea, but what I didn't like was the vague references by Strether's guide to Paris of something deep that only they got. I understood that they saw beauty, life, happiness, that they communicated beyond the formal ways of being in Woollet but after hearing so many vague references to it by the end I wanted to shake the characters and say, "oh shut up!!!" Take this for example:
"That means simply that you've recognized me--which is rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am"
"To be as good as you and me, but different"
This is one quote that I do like and if the book, hadn't driven the point home so many times I may enjoyed the book.
"What I've seen so often spoiled' she pursued, 'is the happy attitude of faith and what shall I call it? The sense of beauty".
Lambert Strether doesn't go crazy with freedom away from his fiance, who controls his entire life having all the money, but in the end it is hinted that he may have lost even her by experiencing real life.
"I don't get drunk, I don't pursue the ladies, I don't spend money I don't even write sonnets. But nevertheless I am making up late for what I didnt' have early."
In Strether's mind (and I will give him this point) it was worth it to throw everything away to just experience life in its rawest form. I agree with him there, because I do think that life is meant to be lived. People who are fully alive inspire a great sense of joy and awe in me and make me happy and calm, just as they did to Strether. I am hopeful however that I don't come across as too selfish or silly, because, in the end, I think I found everything that Strether did to be a tad bit too selfish. His enjoyment of life wasn't something that could be maintained, and was only a bit of an escape from reality. People who can find joy with or with out money, with or without comfort, with or without the inspiring sights of Paris are the ones who really experience life.
The next book I am working on his Book 19-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So far I am enjoying it as a story, but not much more than that.
gh7's review against another edition
4.0
A gay friend of mine once put Henry James’ tendency to play hide and seek with the reader down to the same trait within himself with regards to his sexuality. Apparently he was deeply suspicious of everything that gave him pleasure. “Nothing came to him simply.” And in this novel nothing comes to us simply either.
I think it took me longer to read this than War and Peace. And that’s because virtually every sentence is like trying to figure out a rubic cube. There’s a moment when a character feels he is moving “in a maze of mystic closed allusions”. I couldn’t help wondering if Henry, not a renowned comedian, was having a laugh at the reader’s expense because that’s exactly what I felt as a reader during this novel. There were times when I was reminded of Nabokov and especially Ada, another novel that only inches open its door by degrees when we knock. So there’s something very modern about The Ambassadors. There’s a character who says, “Oh I don’t think anything now. That is but what I do think!” And this kind of mystification, these modifying clauses and sub clauses are a constant trait of this novel. Every sentence is a maze it takes two readings to get out of. It’d be easy to certify this novel as insane, an over-elaborate joke whose wit is lost on virtually everyone except the author, but once I managed to enter into its spirit of wilful obfuscation I began admiring it more and more. Communication, after all, is one of the major stumbling blocks in our lives. Every sentence delivered up to us contains numerous points of departure. To understand what’s communicated to us we simplify it and, as a result, often misrepresent it. Rarely is communication straightforward. We realise this most keenly when we are in love and find ourselves studying the words of the beloved with a metaphysical microscope. In a sense every character in this novel has the keyed up sensibility of the lover, both wilfully deflecting and hungrily truth seeking. The role of ambassador, like lover, is to mask the truth as often as to disclose it.
That said it baffled me when I read afterwards what Henry James thought was the defining passage of this book – “Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?” Is this novel an exhortation to live life to the full? I don’t understand how any character who circles around an answer to a simple question for four paragraphs could be seen as living life to full. In the time it takes the characters to arrive at any defining disclosure in this novel one could have caught the Eurostar to Paris and enjoyed lunch on the terrace of a brasserie. At times it was like a literary version of Big Brother – watching people who have nothing else to do but plot and unmask amorous or tactical alliances. Answers to questions in this novel always give rise to more questions. No one in fact seems capable of ever delivering up a clear answer to any question. There’s one instance where a character answers a question by saying, “Yes”, and then adding as an afterthought, “absolutely not”. Whatever anyone says is inevitably qualified, sometimes contradicted. At the end of every page you can feel you’re back at the beginning. Strether on whom all this elaborate subterfuge is enacted does gain our sympathy because in essence his plight is that of all of us – the struggle to make sense of the bigger picture with broken shards of incomplete information, like the archaeologist down in the trenches of a dig.
Interestingly James creates a world in which men are depicted as pawns for the queenly powers of women until the final stages of the game. There’s also a fantastic female villain who never once appears in the novel. As usual the poor, the downtrodden have no existence whatsoever in Henry James novels. An alien reading HJ might think all earthlings have unlimited leisure. And there’s a fabulous scene where Strether walks into the living reality of a painting he couldn’t afford to buy when he admired it in a Boston art gallery. This was one of the cleverest ways I’ve ever come across of showing how a character has made strides during the course of a narrative.
There’s no way on earth I’d recommend The Ambassadors and yet ultimately I found it an enriching experience, especially in what it has to say about the nature of communication. I also ultimately loved the war it wages on commercial fiction’s tendency to encourage skim reading onto the next twist in the plot. Just try skim reading this! And of course James, again like Nabokov, can write a dazzling sentence…
I think it took me longer to read this than War and Peace. And that’s because virtually every sentence is like trying to figure out a rubic cube. There’s a moment when a character feels he is moving “in a maze of mystic closed allusions”. I couldn’t help wondering if Henry, not a renowned comedian, was having a laugh at the reader’s expense because that’s exactly what I felt as a reader during this novel. There were times when I was reminded of Nabokov and especially Ada, another novel that only inches open its door by degrees when we knock. So there’s something very modern about The Ambassadors. There’s a character who says, “Oh I don’t think anything now. That is but what I do think!” And this kind of mystification, these modifying clauses and sub clauses are a constant trait of this novel. Every sentence is a maze it takes two readings to get out of. It’d be easy to certify this novel as insane, an over-elaborate joke whose wit is lost on virtually everyone except the author, but once I managed to enter into its spirit of wilful obfuscation I began admiring it more and more. Communication, after all, is one of the major stumbling blocks in our lives. Every sentence delivered up to us contains numerous points of departure. To understand what’s communicated to us we simplify it and, as a result, often misrepresent it. Rarely is communication straightforward. We realise this most keenly when we are in love and find ourselves studying the words of the beloved with a metaphysical microscope. In a sense every character in this novel has the keyed up sensibility of the lover, both wilfully deflecting and hungrily truth seeking. The role of ambassador, like lover, is to mask the truth as often as to disclose it.
That said it baffled me when I read afterwards what Henry James thought was the defining passage of this book – “Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?” Is this novel an exhortation to live life to the full? I don’t understand how any character who circles around an answer to a simple question for four paragraphs could be seen as living life to full. In the time it takes the characters to arrive at any defining disclosure in this novel one could have caught the Eurostar to Paris and enjoyed lunch on the terrace of a brasserie. At times it was like a literary version of Big Brother – watching people who have nothing else to do but plot and unmask amorous or tactical alliances. Answers to questions in this novel always give rise to more questions. No one in fact seems capable of ever delivering up a clear answer to any question. There’s one instance where a character answers a question by saying, “Yes”, and then adding as an afterthought, “absolutely not”. Whatever anyone says is inevitably qualified, sometimes contradicted. At the end of every page you can feel you’re back at the beginning. Strether on whom all this elaborate subterfuge is enacted does gain our sympathy because in essence his plight is that of all of us – the struggle to make sense of the bigger picture with broken shards of incomplete information, like the archaeologist down in the trenches of a dig.
Interestingly James creates a world in which men are depicted as pawns for the queenly powers of women until the final stages of the game. There’s also a fantastic female villain who never once appears in the novel. As usual the poor, the downtrodden have no existence whatsoever in Henry James novels. An alien reading HJ might think all earthlings have unlimited leisure. And there’s a fabulous scene where Strether walks into the living reality of a painting he couldn’t afford to buy when he admired it in a Boston art gallery. This was one of the cleverest ways I’ve ever come across of showing how a character has made strides during the course of a narrative.
There’s no way on earth I’d recommend The Ambassadors and yet ultimately I found it an enriching experience, especially in what it has to say about the nature of communication. I also ultimately loved the war it wages on commercial fiction’s tendency to encourage skim reading onto the next twist in the plot. Just try skim reading this! And of course James, again like Nabokov, can write a dazzling sentence…