Word: stendhals
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...burst on the Seine in a 1959 bestselling novel, Zazie has become almost as influential as Colette's Gigi at the height of La Belle Epoque. Critics have compared Zazie's creator-Raymond Queneau, a distinguished poet and chief reader at the Gallimard publishing house-to Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo and Hegel. (One angry dissenter: Nobel Prize Laureate François Mauriac...
What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find "true greatness," "a hero of the modern spirit," a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany's greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a "storyteller of the very first order." In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile...
...over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...
Room at the Top. A curiously old-fashioned plot about social climbing, recalling Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in a modern welfare-state setting. Based on a book by John Braine, one of Britain's angry young novelists, the picture sometimes verges on caricature and cliche, but it remains one of the best British movies in years...
Braine's novel, in fact, presents a startling parallel to The Red and the Black. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal's masterpiece, Hero Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) is a handsome young parvenu of considerable practical intelligence. Rising 25, he sits at his desk in the town hall and dreams the usual "clerk's dream" of sports "cars, town houses, Riviera villas, linen sheets-and women who look right in them. "I'm going to have the lot," he announces grimly one day, and, like Sorel, he sets his cap for the daughter (Heather Sears...