The Red and the Black

Hadley Suter is here, and she's brilliant, and talking to her was a bit breathtaking for me.

Her book is about French novelist Stendhal, who is one of my favorites, with The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black both being on my short list of my favorite novels of all time.

But this is not your standard story of when was Stendhal born? What was his childhood like? What made him want to be a novelist? Did he know success in his lifetime? What did he write? What's his legacy, et cetera.

Oh, no. Oh, [chuckles] no, no, no, no, no.

It's the kind of question that novelists tackle, right? Because it's sort of like somebody might be saying, "I am not in love with this woman," and they might be thinking, "I'm not in love with this woman," but then they're acting as if they are, and they have to reckon with, well, what does it mean that I'm taking these steps as if I'm in love with this person? Or it's bothering me so much to believe that I'm not in love with this woman or, or that you're going to be a certain occupation or you're going to have a certain kind of life.

There is something inherently dramatic for a novelist to explore, and we talk about shape-shifters and we talk about people who are, you know...

The, one of the main things I remembered from my reading of The Red and the Black was I read it in college, and I remember being really struck by a footnote and I, unfortunately, I couldn't find my edition and there was a footnote in it.

I'm sure it said something like this where the footnote usually is just to translate French terms or to give, explain some, some now obscure reference.

We're Harmony Bank, where better happens together.

Introduction of The Red and the Black, Volume I.

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The Red and the Black, Volume I by Stendhal.

Translated by Horace B. Samuel.

Introduction.

Madame Bovary wasn't translated for 30 years after it came out.

I don't think The Red and the Black was translated until the 20th century.

So if you were aware of it, people did speak foreign languages and you can certainly trace a lot of kind of interest and excitement in individual novelists.

Meredith, for instance, George Meredith reviewed Madame Bovary in French when it came out.