translation by Burton Raffel. Worth specifying because it is so good.
Finally finished it Wednesday around 3pm. The ending shocked me, in spite of everything—the slow, careful build-up, the complexity of characters, the intricacies of style, tone and thought. So I am, still, an American and not French, and never will be—even though we’ve had almost two hundred years to catch up with Stendhal. The book is still so up-to-date, even edgy. Maybe even especially “edgy.” By today’s shallow standards, no more and no less shallow than those of Julien Sorel’s day. I took nearly two years to read it. Not sure why. In hindsight I could claim I wanted to savor every petite morsel. That might have been it. You can open it anywhere and any paragraph on the page will be an exquisite construction, a detail of sublime importance to the whole. All the way through I kept mumbling to myself that I wish I had read the book when I was about fourteen—it might have saved me lots of grief. But probably not. When you are Julien’s age you can’t see what a book like this shows us, no matter what. I read Proust first, so perhaps he encouraged me to read Stenhal as slowly as possible. Now in the pantheon I have only to read Balzac and Flaubert. Somehow I have no plans to read Balzac, nor Hugo. Flaubert. Can I believe that I have never—at least not to my recollection–read Madame Bovary? I did watch the whole of a television movie production, probably a Masterpiece Theater event some years ago. Will I go on to read The Charterhouse of Parma? That is not certain. As great as The Red and the Black truly is, I don’t feel moved to keep going until I’ve read every published word of Stendhal or anything like that. I didn’t get drunk on him, as I have been trying to do with Thomas Bernhard, and maybe a bit more, with Beckett, and Javier Marías or, maybe, Bolaño. Might be the slant of contemporaneity involved. Greediness for one’s own time to be voiced in ways that resonate and reassure, confirm ourselves in our own opinions and perceptions. Interesting, though, that I did finish this great novel in the same weeks as I read for the first time the great novel by Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. I could not avoid comparing them and finding in each of them the scope and brilliance that sums up an age, that gives us the glimpse into the inner workings of the soul that we want so desperately and so often assume really can’t be done.
On, now, to the stack of books. Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is the one I most want to find and start over again. But of course I can’t locate it after looking all over the house earlier today. Guess I will sink back into Bernhard’s Gargoyles and finish that tonight.
