Adolphe - Softcover

Constant, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 2080705032 ISBN 13: 9782080705037

Publisher: Flammarion, 1993

Synopsis

Enjoying all the advantages of noble birth and intellectual ability, but haunted by a sense of the meaninglessness of life, Adolphe seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beautiful, but older and more vulnerable Ellenore. Unaware of the danger 'of appropriating the language of love, and of fostering in yourself or others emotions of the heart that are transitory', Adolphe unexpectedly falls in love, only to chafe under the burden of an illicit relationship that blocks his public career. Unable to commit himself fully to Ellenore, and yet unwilling to face the pain he would cause by leaving her, Adolphe finds himself caught up in a situation that cannot be remedied, and is resolved only with disastrous results.

About this title

Review

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"

"Small wonders."
--"Time Out London"

"""[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works."
--Adam Begley, "The New York Observer"

"I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
--"The New Yorker"

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
--KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
--"The Wall Street Journal"

About the Author

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was a French-Swiss po-litical writer and novelist. He combined a lively political career with a fertile literary output, while entertaining a series of liaisons with some of Frances most prominent women. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a cham-pion of liberalism and the author of The History of Reli-gion. Posterity, however, remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe (1816).

Edition details

• Publisher: Flammarion
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: French
• ISBN 10: 2080705032
• ISBN 13: 9782080705037
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 224