[UGD]⇒ PDF Belle Du Seigneur Folio No 3039 French Edition Albert Cohen 9782070404025 Books

Belle Du Seigneur Folio No 3039 French Edition Albert Cohen 9782070404025 Books

Download As PDF : Belle Du Seigneur Folio No 3039 French Edition Albert Cohen 9782070404025 Books

Belle Du Seigneur Folio No 3039 French Edition Albert Cohen 9782070404025 Books

This is my favorite book, has been since it came out in French more than 40 years ago. No one writes like Albert Cohen and Belle du Seigneur is the ultimate love story: glorious and completely impossible. His writings are for the happy few who are willing to plunge into his elaborate stream of consciousness and savor his wit and the sublime melange of romanticism and cynicism. He imitates on purpose Proust, Joyce and others, which makes the reading even more delightful. Not to be missed!


Tags : Belle Du Seigneur (Folio, No. 3039) (French Edition) [Albert Cohen] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. French edition,Albert Cohen,Belle Du Seigneur (Folio, No. 3039) (French Edition),Gallimard folio,2070404021,FICTION General,Fiction,Fiction - General,GENERAL,General & Literary Fiction,General Adult,Language readers,Modern fiction

Belle Du Seigneur Folio No 3039 French Edition Albert Cohen 9782070404025 Books Reviews

I sort of liked the protagonist's (if we can call him that) little hobbitty relatives, but 30 pages or so of their witty repartee ensconced in 986 interminable pages of boring sex and self absorption is a pretty low return on my investment.
This is a truly a book by which to drive oneself mad, or so I found it. I could go on about a million little things here evoked by spending hour upon hour reading and rereading this self-defeating novel - for that's the essential problem here, not only are the lovers self-defeating, but the work itself is - but it would be, in the end, as futile an endeavour as the book and, aside from that, limits me here to 1,000 words.

Right. First off, the book is full of reams of haute-bourgeoisie tittle-tattle which its defenders describe as comedic satire, but which doesn't come across as droll or biting at all. It's simply inane. That's the first hurdle the intrepid reader of the book will have to negotiate.

Having thus been forewarned, what this literary pastiche takes as its subject is twofold, the second following from the first 1 ) The essential bestiality of man in all his affairs, but especially love. All else is an illusory veneer shadowing power, which all of us worship, however we humans try to delude ourselves. We are all, as Cohen bangs on about time and again "future corpses" and "apes." This reductionism is taken to its extreme and logical terminus All art, painting, music etc is rubbish save that it allows the powerful caveman to drag the all too willing cavewoman into his lair. 2.) Anti-Proustianism. This is not, as translator David Coward makes clear in his exordium to the book "Albert Cohen and Belle Du Seigneur," merely the opinion, voiced time and again, of our male protagonist Solal, but that of Cohen himself. Why this is so is quite obvious One can't regard as valid truly numinous experiences transcending all earthy power, as narrator Marcel does, with art, music, cathedrals and, above all, the suffering induced by love, if it is all a sop to what poet Ezra Pound called "the twitching of an abdominal nerve" or what Cohen via Solal continually portrays herein as "wriggling together like fish." I am utterly baffled and nonplussed by apparently serious reviewers comparing Cohen to Proust, which is exactly what he emphatically is NOT, by Cohen's own disavowal of the greater artist.

There are other aspects to the book of course. The other overarching theme is that all true love is damned to the hell which Solal and Ariane find themselves almost from the start of the famous seduction chapter, rather like Dante's couple in the Inferno - to whom Cohen alludes - damned to the hell of togetherness forever.
I could write an entire review about how Cohen's interior monologue chapters are so obviously pale copies from Leopold and Molly Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses or a million other ways in which the book, au fond, fails in the execution. But the essential problem is the reductionist view of life from which all the other thematic problems spring.

But here is the quote which should be emblazoned across the front of the book

"Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge."

Cohen? No, Proust. But Proust does not despair, for out of the very sufferings engendered by the amorous life arises spiritual awareness and out of spiritual awareness, art. The problem with writers who would joust with Proust is that they'll find that he's already entered the lists and covered the ground well before them.

Translator David Coward ends his exordium with the asseveration "Belle de Seigneur has the epic grandeur of a descent into hell." Reading it is certainly a descent into a whirligig of pastiches, styles and bilious misanthropy. But as for "epic grandeur" - this is, sadly, exactly what the book lacks.

It's rather if Lucifer tripped.
This mammoth and unforgettable book is both hilarious (a rival to CATCH-22) and very poignant. It is a crime against culture that it was so long unavailable in English. A long and astonishing tour-de-force!
This book is my favorite book.
The character monologues without any punctuation signs makes this book completely unique.
The 900 pages enable you to live this modern yet mythical love story.
Worth it!
This is a marvellous book. I am loving every page so far.....
Fleur
This book is a master piece of art. The quality of the writing is out-standing. This is as much about the love of Solal for Ariane as it is the love of Albert Cohen for the French language
Sorry it took so long for me to do this review. I actually did not know I could/should review my purchases. So here goes - first of all kudos to the seller who did a great job of getting the book to me super fast. I took it on vacation for a week at the beach. Grew up in Geneva and really wanted to read the book because a lot of it takes place in that city. This is a great novel, characters are hilarious (and tragic too of course!).

Highly recommended to anyone who wants a good, long, old-fashioned novel which you will be sad to see end.
This is my favorite book, has been since it came out in French more than 40 years ago. No one writes like Albert Cohen and Belle du Seigneur is the ultimate love story glorious and completely impossible. His writings are for the happy few who are willing to plunge into his elaborate stream of consciousness and savor his wit and the sublime melange of romanticism and cynicism. He imitates on purpose Proust, Joyce and others, which makes the reading even more delightful. Not to be missed!