The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)

The Ambassadors by Henry James. The greatest expression of his talent for witty, observant explorations of what it mean.
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The Ambassadors

May have a few minor defects and so may not be suitable as a present. Washington Square Popular Penguins. The Tragic Muse Modern Classics. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1, titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. The Wings of the Dove Classics. The Portrait of a Lady: The Awkward Age Modern Classics.

The Ambassadors (Dover Thrift Editions): Henry James: leondumoulin.nl: Books

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The Ambassadors Oxford World's Classics. The Portrait of a Lady Penguin Classics. Daisy Miller Penguin Classics. The Ambassadors Modern Library Classics. The Wings of the Dove Penguin Classics.

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From the Back Cover "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to," declares the primary "ambassador" of this novel, adding, "It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. Dover Thrift Editions Paperback: Dover Publications December 31, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.

Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Is this feature helpful? Thank you for your feedback. Read reviews that mention james henry paris strether chad lambert american europe novels newsome pages perhaps literature prose mrs vionnet young woman marry theme. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Newsome, who happens to be rich if not beautiful, has given him the task of retrieving her wayward son Chad from the clutches of a femme fatale in Paris, France.

It's an implied condition that if Strether cannot convince Chad to come home and take over the family business, there will be no marriage to Mrs. Newsome back in Massachusetts. Strether arrives in Paris thinking that he will find Chad debauched by women, wine, and song but is greatly surprised to find him flourishing and in fact improved from the shallow boy he once knew. He is more of a gentleman with a sophisticated mind and tastes. The harpy destroyer of his innocence, Madame de Vionnet, turns out to be an elegant and charming woman who is currently separated from her husband.

Strether can't figure out if Chad is in love with Vionnet our her young daughter, or if he is in love with neither. He begins to realize that he hasn't really ever had time to experience and enjoy life and maybe it's not to late to find a small bit of happiness in Paris among young minds and art.

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Henry James himself ranked this novel as his best so I thought it would be a great place to try reading his work for the first time. Unfortunately, this book is from his "late period" which means its language is a lot more convoluted and dense and can be a bit hard to understand coming into it unaware as I did. The experience to me was closest to reading Shakespeare for the first time.

At points all through this book I would read pages and the realize that I had no idea what had just occurred. And I consider myself an above average reader. A casual reader would lose interest in this book in the first few pages. As you start reading you catch the broad strokes of the action and you have to use context clues not to infer meaning from individual words but whole sections of text.

The great thing was that the more of the book you read, the more beautiful it becomes because your mind starts to get used to the style and is able to decode the meaning of the text. By the end of the book, the language and sentence construction no longer bothered me and I was able to greatly enjoy it. I would say the main conflict of the book is Strether's regret. The fact that at 55, he starts to question his life choices and for the first time, he begins to think about what he wants to do with his life. Fortunately for him, within the confines of this novel, he discovers that maybe he still has TIME to sort out his future.

Does he want to go home and marry Mrs Newsome, does he want to stay in Paris and get together with one of the other women he has met, or does he want to stay single?

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He's ended up middle aged, repressed, depressed, and dull, but at least the author gives Strether the opportunity to make something of his inner life even at this late stage in his life. You'll have to read the book to see if Strether seizes the opportunity he's been given. The prose in The Ambassadors isn't so much "written" as "crafted".

James pushes the English language to near its limits for complexity of sentence construction, with multiple thoughts often nested into a single sentence. Fortunately for the reader, deciphering the prose is made easier by the fact that the vocabulary employed is generally accessible and commonplace.

I'm not a particularly quick reader to begin with, and I had to read this book at perhaps half my normal pace re-reading many sentences to boot in order to glean most of what was being said. Most, not all; there were quite a few clauses I simply couldn't pick the meaning out of.