PDF Love Penguin Classics Stendhal B C J G Knight Gilbert Sale Suzanne Sale Jean Stewart Books

Product details Series Penguin Classics Paperback 336 pages Publisher Penguin Classics; Revised edition (December 30, 1975) Language English ISBN-10 014044307X

Love Penguin Classics Stendhal B C J G Knight Gilbert Sale Suzanne Sale Jean Stewart Books Reviews

• I was introduced to this book through references to it in B.F. Skinner's "Verbal Behavior," in the latter's treatment of "beautiful" and as a reference to the former's analysis of the beautiful mistress in "De l’amour." Also, Skinner's describes Stendhal's term, "crystallization" in the course of a developing love. I continue to read and re-read portions of Stendhal's book and am fascinated by its contemporary relevance.
• Love by Stendhal is a classic, but the marvel about this book is that you get to experience the thoughts of this Nineteenth Century genius, whose love and obsession for a woman - Metilde - drives him to write this detailed and extremely insightful explanation about the passions and obsessions involved in romantic love. Without the assistance of Modern Psychology, Stendhal is able to explain with surprising precision and insight the feelings we experience when we are in love and the causes for such feelings. Anyone interested in understanding romantic love should read this masterpiece. Stendhal is honest, objective, and realistic ... despite being horribly brokenhearted.
• the tedium of stendhal's love. the majority of sentences in the first book reads like maxims. a couple of sentences chosen at random `you might say that by some strange quirk of the heart, your beloved communicates more charm to her surroundings than she herself possesses. ... the man whose heart has leapt at the glimpse of his beloved's white satin hat in the distance is surprised at his own indifference to the greatest society beauty.' sentence after sentence linked together within the text without warning and until the reader is staring at a chained link fence. ont to say that stendhal is not the maximist la rochefoucauld or montaigne, two writers he quotes, were, although his reflections are much too melancholic. and he uses footnotes and attacks opinions of his day, taking the political personal and then generalizing the personal in a manner all too obscure that his anecdotes drown in a thick sludge of tedium. and to make matters worse, he assembles his material in the form of the kama sutra, we get alchemic recipes concerning love. some of the chapter headings concerning the birth of love, concerning hope, concerning the different beginnings of love for the two sexes, concerning infatuation, concerning thunderbolts, concerning modesty, concerning glances, concerning feminine pride, concerning jealousy, cures for love.
  
  love sent me scurrying back to nietzsche who loved stendhal. nietzsche referred to stendhal as one of europe's greatest voices, one of its greatest spirits. it's easy, if one takes the time, to read how nietzsche was influenced by stendhal beyond making death of god remarks (that stendhal made such remarks first poured a little envy into nietzsche's ichors), his love of the french arts and of maxims and, the later nietzsche, troubling political and religious statements.
  
  unlike nietzsche, stendhal's gifts lay in storytelling. still there's the feeling that the nietzsche most influenced by stendhal was affected by the stendhal of love, and nietzsche's work casts light on stendhal's shadowy love.
  
  even without the light of nietzsche, it must be remembered love is a collection grown from unrequited love, the source of melancholia. and what begins as a joyful wisdom, falls flat. love had been in the shadows of lawrence sterne's brilliance.
  
  things pick up considerably in book two with glimmers of the stendhal of the red and the black, with a nod toward the charterhouse of parma. even those sterne shadows begin to fade when stendhal moves toward a concern of love in different climates. love flourishes better in hot climates, he says, than in cold climates, with the exception of switzerland of where stendhal's anecdotes read like the original farmer's daughter jokes. nor is the united states spared, of our national innocence (before playboy, porn internet and high profile political adulteries and church sex scandals) stendhal wrote `... we see that the americans, without the misfortunes of governments, feel themselves to be lacking in something. it is as though the springs of sensitiveness had dried up in these people; they are rational, but they are not at all happy. ... there is such a habit of reason in the united states that the crystallization of love there has become impossible.'
  
  in book one, stendhal developed a phenomena, a principle, of what he called `crystallization', as a metaphor of love from an activity at the salt mines of salzburg, where `they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. the smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit's claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.' what stendhal calls `crystallization is a mental process of the perfection of the loved one.' an interesting and often amusing philosophy, until he becomes overly sententious. and much of the book is amusing and urbane.
  
  the appendices, if you get that far (the often tedious text, rather compact at less than 275 pages, john updike referred to as `long'), are not to be skipped. the salzburg bough, ernestine, and an example of love can stand alone as short stories or, if true, anecdotes.
• The questionnaire seems to think this book is a novel. It's not. It is, however, a detailed and insightful piece of work on love. Stendhal himself is highly reputed by both Nietzsche and Beauvoir.
• It's all here for the taking. Stendhal covers the angles on this very difficult feeling. Read this with Erich Fromm and begin to understand.
• Stendhal spent a lot of time thinking about courtship, romance, and love. He spent a lot of time observing it. He spent a lot of time writing about it. How much personal experience or success he had, apart from one big rejection, is unclear. The one concept he may be most noted for is the "crystalization" which occurs after an initial period of dating when doubt, fear, and uncertainty about the love object occur. According to him, this process is necessary to compel lovers together to quell those very doubts. It is a mental process in which the beloved is idealized to an extreme degree. Apart from this, many of his musings seem quite dated as they are nearly 200 years old, and relationships between men and women have been affected by modern culture, feminism, etc. Apart from this, one conclusion that can be drawn is that there is too little love and that this part of human experience is mostly underdeveloped. This is probably so here in the U.S.
• No page numbers, no index, lots of misprints