Modern Library Classics: The Ambassadors (Paperback)

from lucybrown

This is a joy of a book, at least for those who love James, the tale of the irresistible education of a middle age American man into the vagaries of late 19th century European manners and mores. Thoroughly captivating and saturating, not a quick "read" by any means. More like one of those books i...

from AlanWPowers

I read this in college, in a seminar on Dickens and James with Prof G Armour Craig (later interim Pres of Amherst College). I know I wrote one of my best papers on this novel, culminating in revelations at the ending: of course, Jamesian narrators are very surprised by sophisticated European affa...

from stillatim

My second time through, and I'm happy to find that I still love the thing to bits, and for the reasons I love all James: it's not about what happens, it's about coming to understand why it happens. Were I being over the top and polemical, I would say: all novels worth reading, since this one, hav...

from Schmerguls

I read this book in 1963 with considerable enjoyment. Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to induce Chad Newsome to return to Massachusetts. Strether finds Newsome in the toils of Marie de Vincent--virtuously, he feels, until Book XI. Book XI is some kind of supreme masterpiece. I would like to quo...

from vaellus

An example of the notoriously convoluted late style of Henry James. The style has its moments in this novel of social and emotional complexities and ambiguities, but at times it can seem like grasping at air and nuancing the irrelevant without ever letting a shirt go unbuttoned or manners lapse f...