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A review by brucefarrar
The Ambassadors by Henry James
2.0
Lambert Strether is dispatched to Europe to bring home the wayward son of his fiancée, Mrs. Newsome back to Woollett, Massachusetts to assume his proper place in the family manufacturing business instead of wasting his time in Paris. He’s obviously in the clutches of a bad woman. But when Strether arrives in Paris and is introduced to the woman, he’s charmed by her and the loveliness of her grown daughter. Also he finds Chad Newsome to be much improved and refined by the influence of Madame de Vionnet.
The novel dissects Strether’s opinions of his mission and what he should do as it changes first one way and then another in a tortuously florid sentences using vapid and abstract language. Here’s an example from the final part of the book. Strether has come to see Chad for the final time before leaving. The characters are realistic, the emotional power of the revelations to Strether and the reader are striking, but the wording is hideously stiff and slow.
“He was disturbed, as it were, only for him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down—if it wasn’t indeed rather to screw him up—the more gently. Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely made out was that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious assurances.” (from page 412 of the text included on the first disc)
Throughout the book my reactions alternated between: What does that mean in English? What in the world are they talking about? And just get on with it!
In Oscar Wilde's dialog "The Decay of Lying" he has his character Vivian, expounding on the lack of imagination in contemporary fiction, say:'Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.'"
I felt that it was a painful duty to endure listening through to the end of the book. In the droning tedium of his diction I heard a style that was vacuous, phrasing that was tedious, and nothing either swift or satirical in the book.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Old Saybrook : Tantor Media, 2010. 412. PDF eBook
Wilde, Oscar “The Decay of Lying: An Observation” Plays, Prose Writings and Poems.New York : Knopf, 1991. 75. Print.
The novel dissects Strether’s opinions of his mission and what he should do as it changes first one way and then another in a tortuously florid sentences using vapid and abstract language. Here’s an example from the final part of the book. Strether has come to see Chad for the final time before leaving. The characters are realistic, the emotional power of the revelations to Strether and the reader are striking, but the wording is hideously stiff and slow.
“He was disturbed, as it were, only for him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down—if it wasn’t indeed rather to screw him up—the more gently. Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely made out was that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious assurances.” (from page 412 of the text included on the first disc)
Throughout the book my reactions alternated between: What does that mean in English? What in the world are they talking about? And just get on with it!
In Oscar Wilde's dialog "The Decay of Lying" he has his character Vivian, expounding on the lack of imagination in contemporary fiction, say:'Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.'"
I felt that it was a painful duty to endure listening through to the end of the book. In the droning tedium of his diction I heard a style that was vacuous, phrasing that was tedious, and nothing either swift or satirical in the book.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Old Saybrook : Tantor Media, 2010. 412. PDF eBook
Wilde, Oscar “The Decay of Lying: An Observation” Plays, Prose Writings and Poems.New York : Knopf, 1991. 75. Print.