The Ambassadors
Chad Newsome has gone to Paris. He is charmed by Old World fascinations and caught up in the leisurely craft and bohemian direction of European worldliness. An older woman of rank and adventurous but subtle skill, Madame de Vionnet, strokes his ego and does her best to keep Chad in Paris indefinitely. Chad's mother lives in Woollett, Mass., and wants her son to return to run the family business. Mrs. Newsome is an invalid and cannot go to Paris to fetch her son herself, so she employs Lambert Strether and Sarah Pocock to return Chad to Massachusetts. Sarah has been to Paris before and is aware of its attractiveness, so her determination to succeed in this task is fixed and uncompromising. Strether is of later middle age, however, and inspired by the fairytale of a beautiful life in Europe. Mrs. Newsome has promised to marry Strether if he can bring Chad home. Strether is completely enamored by the Parisian character and its enchantments and has a difficult time completing his mission. The drama of reestablishing Chad in business in America and of coming to terms with the mythological romance of France leaves the reader unbalanced, trying to recover equilibrium in the real world. Those involved with Chad's rescue are compelled to recognize the deep intimacies of personal attachment and the accepted proprieties of direct consequence. The success and failures of such an undertaking are unpredictable.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
4mentions
4people
2017–2026years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.
Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:
The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
- Other difficult books, in a somewhat increasing order of difficulty:
0) The autumn of the patriarch, by Marquez
1) Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake
2) The third period of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl).
3) The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch
I do suggest trying Gormenghast, it's an amazingly written fantasy series.
- Most likely, yes.
In a previous century: https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/07/26/nietzsche... Nietzsche’s Transformative Typewriter and http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-author-signal-nietzs... The Author Signal: Nietzsche’s Typewriter and Medium Theory.
But then:
> The case of Henry James’s move from handwriting (typewriting) to dictation in the middle of What Maisie Knew has been studied by Hoover (2009). Yet, according to the NYU professor, the author of The Ambassadors took this sudden change in his stride and, despite the fact that we know exactly where the switch occurred, stylometry has been helpless in this case; or, rather, can show no sudden shift in James’s stylistic evolution that continues throughout his career (Hoover 2009).
- How originally do you mean? In Henry James's novel The Ambassadors (1903), a character speaks of going into advertising "Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force."
