BOOKS:Charterhouse of Parma

Henry James said the "Charterhouse of Parma" "was one of the the dozen finest novels we possess," Andre Gide called it one of the greatest of all French novels and Balzac said that in the "Charterhouse" he found, "perfection in everything." Written by Stendhal in 1839, the book was an immediate success. Stendhal, locked in an apartment, wrote the book within a few weeks. And it reads like a book written in a few weeks, the prose moves ahead briskly from description to plot to psychological analysis and back again. The story whirls around a series interesting characters: a young Italian aristocrat Fabrice del Dongo, his beautiful aunt Gina, Duchess of Sanserverina, her lover Count Mosca and a jailer's daughter Clelia. The story takes place after the Battle of Waterloo in the fictional Italian dukedom of Parma. Parma is actually a real place, but the dukedom and the characters are a fudge. The characters, however are based on real figures: Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III and his beautiful aunt Vandossa mistress of the Rodrigo Borgia, the infamous Pope Alexander VI. Add to these real characters some real life intrigue a murder and some jail time and Stendhal had his plot. But putting the plot aside, intriguing as it is, the main strength of the book is its keen assessment of human character an assessment which is deep and profound. Richard Howard's 1999 translation does better than any English translation in rendering the swift narrative and meaning of the original French. With Howard's translation the book is experienced by the English reader like no other translation before it. "The Charterhouse" is a big historical soap opera, but a magnificent one.