Stendhal on Love (English-Chinese Bilingual Reader)

Author: Stendhal
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: Reasons to read this book: He said, "Love is a miracle of civilization"; he also said, "Love is a fragrant flower that needs to be plucked from terrifying cliffs and rocks," and added, "Marriage without love is against the natural state," and "Only unions dominated by true passion are the only ever-legal unions." He is regarded as a romanticist who keeps a distance from romanticism, an anti-powerist longing for the world before the revolution. He is clearly a dreamer and a soft-hearted enthusiast, yet deliberately portrays himself as a cynic; he is clearly a man of passionate impulses, yet he is not fond of rationalistic analysis. Recommended for the following groups to read this book: seasoned players in love or those newly experiencing love, lovers of or opponents of French literature, frequent heartbreakers or "saints of love," middle-aged individuals or teenagers, and all high school and middle school students.
This book was almost ignored upon its first publication. Eleven years after its release, only 17 copies were sold. But today, no one doubts that it is a great work. Thinkers are often not well-received by their contemporaries. Stendhal lived at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, yet he was "writing for the 20th century." His "greatness" came a century later. This book is considered a typical work that fully showcases the author's "two-sided" personality: deep sensitivity and cold analysis, sentimentality and heightened reason, arrogance and self-abuse, genuine emotion and manipulation. He was deeply in love with Mme. de Mathieu, but Mme. de Mathieu did not love him or understand him. As a "heartbreaker," he achieved this book. It is an outpouring of the emotions of a "heartbreaker," and thus this book is seen as the "secret confessions" of the author's own emotional experiences and pursuits. In this regard, it is somewhat similar to the masterpiece by the great writer Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.