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The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $7.00
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Average Customer Rating:
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The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.4
EAN: 9780140432336
ISBN: 0140432337
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 528
Publication Date: 1987-03-03
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.4
EAN: 9780140432336
ISBN: 0140432337
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 528
Publication Date: 1987-03-03
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Editorial Review of The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)
The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on him. Strether also becomes involved in a very Jamesian "relation" with the fascinating Miss Maria Gostrey, a fellow American and informal Sacajawea to her compatriots. Clearly Paris has "improved" Chad beyond recognition, and convincing him to return to the U.S. is going to be a very, very hard sell. Suspense, of course, is hardly James's stock-in-trade. But there is no more meticulous mapper of tone and atmosphere, nuance and implication. His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly when they're exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a person upon whom nothing is lost. --Rhian Ellis
Customer Reviews of The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Audiobook is Easier
Review: The audiobook version of The Ambassadors makes the famously dense prose of Henry James easier (but not easy)to wade through. Most of the book consists of scenes in which two of the several principals meet to discuss the basic situation: whether or not a young New England manufacturing heir, Chad Newsome, can be persuaded to leave Paris--and his paramour, Madame de Vionnet--and return to his Mom in America.
Everyone else is some kind of ambassador. Most prominently, Lambert Strether is Mom's fiancee and first ambassador. When he succumbs to the charms of Europe and Madame de Vionnet, more insulated ambassadors race over from America--Mom's daughter, Sarah, and son-in-law Jim--to try their luck, ineffectively, as it turns out, with the wayward Chad.
The role of ambassador becomes more nuanced as various characters from Europe and America assume the role with each other in subtle ways. Strether, the most deeply explored and self-aware character, demonstrates
an inner-ambassadorian way of managing his own conflicts and divided loyalties.
All this takes place in slow motion over the course of three downloads.
James structures each scene, or dialogue between two principals, by leap-frogging from the beginning of the scene to it's end, then back-tracking to reveal the middle. This seems to be consistent with his means-justifying-the end theme, in which the interesting thing is not how things wind up (which is unresolved in The Ambassadors), but how they get there.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The failure to enjoy
Review: A wealthy US family sends its `ambassadors' to Paris in order to convince an heir to abandon the `life of a pagan' and return home to run the family business.
The theme of Henry James's impeccably written and extremely polished prose is what Nietzsche called the `right or the wrong conjugation': to live or to be lived. `One lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be like me, without the memory of that illusion. Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Live!'
For Henry James, people lived in `the corruption of Europe' with its `femmes du monde'; people were lived in the US. It is the Catholic (live like God in France) against the Protestant ethic (`I seem to have a life only for other people').
We are far away here from the Calvinist lesson of `Daisy Miller' who died because she didn't respect the supreme respectability of her class.
The novel advances extremely slowly, is full of suggestions, hints, (mis)understandings and fluctuating feelings. Direct confrontations are subdued to the extreme, and end with a laugh.
The novel has another typical characteristic of James's stories: it's all about `thoroughbred' people, sublime members of the high society. They are presented in a superlative style: prodigious, exquisite, graceful, supreme, transcendent, precious, admirable, beautiful, bright, lovely, magnificent, splendid, brilliant, wonderful ...
With its essential message, this novel is a classic masterpiece.
Not to be missed.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Ambassadors
Review: This is surely one of the great works of literature. The style may seem at times slow going, but it rewards the patient reader with its rich, sensitive portrayal of characters and the varied effects of the old world charm of Paris on New England visitors. It is suspenseful thoughtful and brilliant in its depiction of social interactions.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Wrong cover
Review: The book arrived in good condition, but it didn't have the beautiful red embossed hardcover that the website shows.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great, but
Review: The Ambassadors is a novel that unravels itself continuously and feels in many ways like a mystery, yet nothing in the novel occurs in the way of crime or even baseness. Every other great novel I've read has dealt, in one way or another, with some weighty issue or theme; I feel The Ambassadors does not. Despite this I found myself mesmerized by its intricacies, its perpetual ability to surprise; yet I also frequently asked myself whether I cared enough about its subject matter to continue. In the preface James tells the reader that it's about a man who, late in life, reflects on what he's missed in his youth, and the possibility of recapturing it. This man, the main character, is Strether, who has been sent to Paris to bring back to New England the son of a wealthy widow he hopes to marry; if he fails to do so, his engagement falls through and the son loses a large chunk of his inheritance. The mission is viewed somewhat as a rescue since the son is believed to be ensnared in the throes of either an unsuitable woman or a dissipate lifestyle, or both. Europe, and especially Paris, awakens latent feelings in the provincial Strether, and what he discovers in Paris turns out to be full of surprises for him. Beyond this, I don't think it matters much what the novel is about - it seems to me that the broader one outlines it, the less palatable it appears. The novel is very subtle, and definitely the most dense and tedious of any I have read. I find the characters to be so intelligent and flawless in their manners that they become intimidating, oppressively so. I don't care about the outcome for any of them because I feel they lack humanity. It's as if regular people did not figure into James's universe. However, I do feel that, in technical terms, it is the most perfect novel I have read, and therefore deserves to be ranked among the greatest ever.
Review Summary: The Audiobook is Easier
Review: The audiobook version of The Ambassadors makes the famously dense prose of Henry James easier (but not easy)to wade through. Most of the book consists of scenes in which two of the several principals meet to discuss the basic situation: whether or not a young New England manufacturing heir, Chad Newsome, can be persuaded to leave Paris--and his paramour, Madame de Vionnet--and return to his Mom in America.
Everyone else is some kind of ambassador. Most prominently, Lambert Strether is Mom's fiancee and first ambassador. When he succumbs to the charms of Europe and Madame de Vionnet, more insulated ambassadors race over from America--Mom's daughter, Sarah, and son-in-law Jim--to try their luck, ineffectively, as it turns out, with the wayward Chad.
The role of ambassador becomes more nuanced as various characters from Europe and America assume the role with each other in subtle ways. Strether, the most deeply explored and self-aware character, demonstrates
an inner-ambassadorian way of managing his own conflicts and divided loyalties.
All this takes place in slow motion over the course of three downloads.
James structures each scene, or dialogue between two principals, by leap-frogging from the beginning of the scene to it's end, then back-tracking to reveal the middle. This seems to be consistent with his means-justifying-the end theme, in which the interesting thing is not how things wind up (which is unresolved in The Ambassadors), but how they get there.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The failure to enjoy
Review: A wealthy US family sends its `ambassadors' to Paris in order to convince an heir to abandon the `life of a pagan' and return home to run the family business.
The theme of Henry James's impeccably written and extremely polished prose is what Nietzsche called the `right or the wrong conjugation': to live or to be lived. `One lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be like me, without the memory of that illusion. Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Live!'
For Henry James, people lived in `the corruption of Europe' with its `femmes du monde'; people were lived in the US. It is the Catholic (live like God in France) against the Protestant ethic (`I seem to have a life only for other people').
We are far away here from the Calvinist lesson of `Daisy Miller' who died because she didn't respect the supreme respectability of her class.
The novel advances extremely slowly, is full of suggestions, hints, (mis)understandings and fluctuating feelings. Direct confrontations are subdued to the extreme, and end with a laugh.
The novel has another typical characteristic of James's stories: it's all about `thoroughbred' people, sublime members of the high society. They are presented in a superlative style: prodigious, exquisite, graceful, supreme, transcendent, precious, admirable, beautiful, bright, lovely, magnificent, splendid, brilliant, wonderful ...
With its essential message, this novel is a classic masterpiece.
Not to be missed.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Ambassadors
Review: This is surely one of the great works of literature. The style may seem at times slow going, but it rewards the patient reader with its rich, sensitive portrayal of characters and the varied effects of the old world charm of Paris on New England visitors. It is suspenseful thoughtful and brilliant in its depiction of social interactions.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Wrong cover
Review: The book arrived in good condition, but it didn't have the beautiful red embossed hardcover that the website shows.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great, but
Review: The Ambassadors is a novel that unravels itself continuously and feels in many ways like a mystery, yet nothing in the novel occurs in the way of crime or even baseness. Every other great novel I've read has dealt, in one way or another, with some weighty issue or theme; I feel The Ambassadors does not. Despite this I found myself mesmerized by its intricacies, its perpetual ability to surprise; yet I also frequently asked myself whether I cared enough about its subject matter to continue. In the preface James tells the reader that it's about a man who, late in life, reflects on what he's missed in his youth, and the possibility of recapturing it. This man, the main character, is Strether, who has been sent to Paris to bring back to New England the son of a wealthy widow he hopes to marry; if he fails to do so, his engagement falls through and the son loses a large chunk of his inheritance. The mission is viewed somewhat as a rescue since the son is believed to be ensnared in the throes of either an unsuitable woman or a dissipate lifestyle, or both. Europe, and especially Paris, awakens latent feelings in the provincial Strether, and what he discovers in Paris turns out to be full of surprises for him. Beyond this, I don't think it matters much what the novel is about - it seems to me that the broader one outlines it, the less palatable it appears. The novel is very subtle, and definitely the most dense and tedious of any I have read. I find the characters to be so intelligent and flawless in their manners that they become intimidating, oppressively so. I don't care about the outcome for any of them because I feel they lack humanity. It's as if regular people did not figure into James's universe. However, I do feel that, in technical terms, it is the most perfect novel I have read, and therefore deserves to be ranked among the greatest ever.