Adolphe (Penguin Classics)

I really enjoyed this read. I enjoyed the interplay between the characters. I read this book in about two days. Easy read.

I haven't received or read this translation yet, but I'm really looking forward to it, because I have read two other translations of ADOLPHE (Wildman and Mauldoon), and know that Leonard Tannock was especially concerned about the quality of his translations from French.ADOLPHE is a short novel (really a novella), the only literary production of Benjamin Constant but one of the most important novels in French history.You could consider it Proust in miniature for its startlingly acute analysis of the psychology of love, indifference, and despair, all of which preoccupied Proust at major length. Based on Constant's real-life affairs, it has the ring of authority and grips any receptive reader from start to last.The mystery is why Constant never wrote another novel (or novella). His political career was illustrious, but so was his literary gift. Why he squelched it is hard to fathom.

Great read. I got it as a gift thinking the recipient would enjoy it but with kids nowadays too busy updating their Facebook profile, this purchase was probably wasteful. Oh well, hopefully .. one day!

This a book about a disillusioned youth, and a love affaire driven more by confusion than love. ItIs important because it is modern, yet published in 1816.

After reading the first chapter I was hooked. It summed up a typical youth "angst". The rest isn't bad....Its just you have to be into the whole phycological romance theme. There are next to no events that actually occur in this novel. It took me a day to read so if your reading this and your even slightly interested check it out.

before it has even begun." Or some such. As the other reviewer said, this is a sort of an anti-Werther. Adolphe himself is an amusing fellow, and he had me cringing with sympathy for his efforts to rid-or-not-rid himself of his mistress. Caveat: you might want to look for an edition that includes "The Red Notebook," a hilarious short novel about the far ranging but completely aimless adventures of a similar (but this time mistressless) young man.

"We are such impressionable creatures that we end up by really experiencing the emotions we stimulate." Benjamin Constant.Sometimes just one sentence hits us between the eyes and then...nothing looks the same anymore.

"You can't always get what you want", the Rolling Stones famously admitted some decades ago. In a very French, disillusioned way, Constant explores what happens when you do get what you want. His anti-hero Adolphe manages to win the heart of the woman he has made himself believe he loves. Soon enough, he is no longer so sure about his feelings for her. By that time, however, she has already left her former partner and is emotionally dependent on Adolphe. To put it bluntly, the novel is about his trying and failing to get rid of her. The situation is getting more and more tortuous for both of them. In a way this novel can be read as an answer to Goethe's famous "Sorrows of Young Werther" in which the protagonist ends up killing himself because he cannot get the girl he loves. Of course Goethe's book was a lot more successful at the time than Constant's. The worth of Constant's novel is that it is one of the few instants in which somebody speaks out with whom somebody else is unhappily in love with. There is less poetry in that position than in the opposite one, but Constant's stark psychological realism in the tradition of the French moralists makes this one a gripping read with a provocative conclusion.

In Benjamin Constant's 'Adolphe' we meet the young, privileged Adolphe who, at the age of twenty-two and having just left the University of Gottingen, embarks on a tour of Europe before setting down to learn his father's profession. However, instead of broadening his knowledge, Adolphe becomes dissatisfied and bored with the people around him and it is not until he meets the beautiful Ellenore, an older woman and the Polish mistress of Count P__, a distant relative of his, that his life seems to become more exciting for him. And, at first, life is certainly less boring; initially rebuffed by the lovely Ellenore, Adolphe, heartsick but intent on winning the woman he feels he has fallen in love with, pursues her until she at last capitulates and declares her love for him. Totally engulfed by her feelings for her young lover, Ellenore leaves Count P____ and her children behind her and devotes herself to Adolphe for whom she professes an undying passion. However, before long, as Adolphe's ardour for his beautiful mistress begins to cool, he finds himself feeling suffocated and resentful, but whenever he tries to distance himself, Ellenore's intense reaction to losing Adolphe results in him feeling guilty and sorry for the woman who has given up everything to be with him. When Ellenore's father dies and she goes to Poland to claim her inheritance, Adolphe is persuaded to go with her, but he goes with a reluctance that he finds difficult to hide, and when he finally gathers the courage to tackle Ellenore with his desire to end their relationship, something happens which takes the decision out of his hands.First published in 1816 and deftly translated from the French by Leonard Tannock, this short novel is one that focuses entirely on the feelings of young Adolphe and on his relationship with an older, passionate woman. As the novel is first-person narrated by Adolphe, we only really see the story of the couple's love affair from his perspective and, as a young and self-centred man intent on his own desires, it does make for a rather claustrophobic feeling to the story - although not in a negative way. Based on the author's own stormy love affair with Madame de Stael and also influenced by Constant's relationship with Anna Lindsay (the beautiful, ageing mistress of an aristocrat) this story is not one in which the author meanders or strives for picturesque effects, it is one in which, as Leonard Tannock states in his introduction to the book: ‘Everything not bearing upon the main problem is ruthlessly pruned, and the result is a microcosm of the human condition.” I couldn’t have put it better myself, hence the quote, but I can say that I was totally involved in the story from beginning to end.4 Stars.

Very classic story of a younger man falling in love with an older woman.

il n'est pas indiqué qu'il s'agit d'une traduction anglaise ! ce que je veux c'est la version originale françaisele procédé est incorrect vis à vis des lecteurs