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Reviewed by:
  • Stendhal by Francesco Manzini
  • Kate M. Bonin
Manzini, Francesco. Stendhal. Reaktion, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78914-157-3. Pp. 205.

This biography of "the artist formerly known as Marie-Henri Beyle" (26) belongs to Reaktion's "Critical Lives" series, which aims to present the works of important cultural figures within the contexts of these figures' major life events. The "Critical Lives" volumes are deliberately short, with a slim bibliography and few references. As such, the series seems to target non-specialist readers: the general public or undergraduates, for example. Individual "Critical Lives" works can be of varying quality. That said, Manzini's biography of Stendhal challenges quite a few received notions about the "realist novelist" from Grenoble. For example, Manzini maintains that the true protagonists of Le rouge et le noir and La chartreuse de Parme are not Julien and Fabrice, but rather Mathilde de la Mole and Gina Sanseverina, arguing that there is much more to be said about Stendhal's women characters than the reductive labels of "angelic" or "Amazonian" pasted onto them by Jean Prévost in 1951. Although some famous Stendhalian concepts such as "crystallization" get short shrift, Manzini devotes considerable time to Stendhal's multiple, multiform relationships with women of varying ages, nationalities, and political stripes; from his heroine-crush on Marat's assassin Charlotte Corday, to his fascinating meeting with Madame d'Agoult-Montmaur, the model for Choderlos de Laclos's Madame de Merteuil. Stendhal's ability to form and maintain friendships with women (whether or not they had ever been romantically involved) is rightly celebrated. However, disappointingly, Manzini also repeatedly emphasizes that Stendhal was not a conventionally attractive man (how many times does the reader need reminding that Stendhal was heavyset?). In a more nuanced fashion, Manzini maps the tensions between beylism, which he briefly defines as a "defence and assertion of the singular self" (59), and the "endless series of false identities" (26) produced by Henri Beyle, the art and music critic, novelist, and sometime government functionary. Manzini ably traces Stendhal's finely shaded political affinities: his "instinctive, filial love" for the Republic (47); his waxing and waning [End Page 207] admiration for Napoleon. More broadly, Manzini's Stendhal theorizes that all of humankind may be divided among con artists and their dupes (55), yet also longs desperately for the company of the famous "happy few" with whom he could be his authentic self (however elusive and mutable). Stendhal, for Manzini, is constantly suspended between the fear that all love is mediated by rivalry, that all friendship "might in fact be no more than disguised competition" (55), and the hope that this may not be the case. Though some of Manzini's thumbnail interpretations of Stendhal's creative works feel a bit shallow or breezy (should Armance really be dismissed as no more than a parody of René?), Manzini's style is witty and unaffected, full of sympathy for his subject and sprinkled with modernisms to make a contemporary reader smile—for instance, he refers to the Edinburgh Review as "the Wikipedia of the Romantic era" (109). As a point of departure for more serious study, Manzini's Stendhal is worthwhile and engaging reading.

Kate M. Bonin
Arcadia University (PA)
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