Word: stendhals
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...PRIVATE DIARIES OF STENDHAL (570 pp.)-Edited and Translated by Robert Sage-Doubleday...
Nonetheless, the youth who later adopted the pen name Stendhal and became one of the world's great novelists once deigned to write something not for the ages, but for himself. The result is something for the ages. It is the famous Journal, finally translated into English a century and a half after it was written...
...Beyle-Stendhal, that kind of playacting was how men of character faced the facts of life. It is a key to his,thought. He hated hypocrisy, and so did his principal literary heroes, Julien Sorel. the ambitious provincial, Lucien Leuwen, the morose bourgeois, Fabrizio del Dongo, the romantic idealist. But to all of them and to all the young men who set out to conquer the world, Stendhal's message was plain: be insincere. It is one of the piquant paradoxes of the diary that Beyle offers the advice in all sincerity...
JULI ETTA, translated by Alison Brothers (147 pp.; Messner; $3), is a contrasting companion piece from the same perfumed pen. It is a moony, brilliant bit of boy-meets-girlishness, more or less what might have happened if Stendhal had been writing for Sam Goldwyn. The ideal cast: Gary Grant, Gene Tierney and Audrey Hepburn. The plot: Tierney, a high-fashion cutie, comes for a visit at the country house of Grant, her fiancé. No sooner has she arrived than Grant discovers that Hepburn, a runaway adolescent, has parked herself on his premises. Sure that Tierney...
French Stories and Tales, ably edited by Stanley Geist, a young American critic and writer living in Paris, offers the richer literary experience. The selections range from a Stendhal love story, as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony, to a fragment of Swiftian satire by Baudelaire on the suicide of a Parisian street urchin. In between, Balzac, Zola and Guy de Maupas sant lash at the favorite whipping boy of French letters, the French middle class. Best yarns in the book are stories of simple nobodies by Gustave Flaubert and Joris-Karl Huysmans...