The Ambassadors (1903)

Maybe a little bit too subtle; I sometimes felt I was drowning in obscure idioms, euphemisms, and circumlocution. Still, few authors handle entrapment as brilliantly as Henry James. ( )

I am nearly now at the end of the marathon Henry James readathon that a I began two years ago. Only two books of tales and two novels to go.

The Ambassadors marks the halfway point of James’s final great trilogy of novels, bookended by Wings of a Dove and The Golden Bowl. It tells the tale of Lambert Strether, a middle-aged Bostonian of unclear means (but probably meagre ones) who is despatched to Paris to bring back the son of Mrs. Newsome, his sort-of fiancée - it is never quite clear whether a betrothal has taken place, but then it’s never quite clear with Strether what has taken place. He’s one of James’s great late portraits of middle age - insecure, unhappy, uncertain, finding contentment at part in Paris, its streets and its art but most of all its sensibilities. In this he is like Mrs Newsome’s errant son Chad, who he finds an apparently more likeable and more grounded and rounded person than he remembered, made rich by the example of Paris and more specifically of Madame de Vionnet, an exquisite woman with a grown daughter, whose marital status is uncertain.

And that’s the point of the project for James, I think. Everything in this book is uncertain, contingent, ambiguous. Every single character is unreliable - or at least their motives are murky. It’s actually a triumph of sustained control but it does make it hard to relate, to anyone - at least until towards the end, when Strether decides to return to America and give up all he has gained. I feel the ending is meant to be tragic - but I’m not even sure about that. ( )

Paris and illicit love good or bad?

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, have done precisely that. ( )

Gli ambasciatori sono persone fidate che la signora Newsome, ricca possidente di Woollett, cittadina industriale del New England, spedisce a Parigi perché riportino a casa il figlio Chad, sospettato di sprecare il suo tempo in bagordi. Il primo di questi “ambasciatori” è Lambert Strether, cinquantenne di bella presenza, intelligente e interessato alla mano della signora Newsome. Giunto a Parigi, scopre che il vero motivo che trattiene Chad dal tornare è una relazione con Madame de Vionnet. Invece di impegnarsi nel convincere il giovane a far ritorno a casa, Strether si lascia sedurre dal fascino della vecchia Europa e della scoppiettante capitale francese, dimenticando del tutto il motivo del viaggio e mettendo in crisi non solo il ruolo di “ambasciatore”, ma il senso stesso del suo intero percorso esistenziale. Intanto la signora Newsome, non sapendo cosa pensare, invia uno dopo l’altro nuovi ambasciatori che, puntualmente, cadono a loro volta nella rete di fascinazioni del beau monde, rimanendone invischiati. Scritto tra il 1900 e il 1901 e pubblicato nel 1903, Gli ambasciatori è un romanzo ampiamente autobiografico, considerato dallo stesso James come il suo capolavoro.