Is The Red and the Black good? Where the book stalls

You have opened The Red and the Black, or are about to, and the question is a fair one: is it worth it? The Nous answer is yes, with one condition. Stendhal's novel has two parts where the reader tends to stall, and whoever gets through them with a map finds the book moving. The lecture does not give the novel a grade. It does something more useful: it says where the book asks for patience and what to do when that patience runs out.

Who the book is for

The lecture opens with the sentence that defines the novel's natural reader: if you have lived a moment in life that was like sitting an exam, this book is about you. Julien Sorel is a young man who treats his whole life, and even love, as a campaign to be won, and what the book shows is what happens in the rare hours when he stops pretending. Whoever likes to read slowly, stopping at each scene, is on the right ground. The summary, in the order of the book, is in What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about.

First stall: the Verrières chronicles

The first chapters look like a small-town chronicle: the mayor, the priest, the sawmill. You feel like skipping them. The lecture asks for the opposite: do not skip, because that is where the trap is set.

The image is not explained, but the book shows what is being assembled there. Verrières is a town where the narrator gives its rule in two words in capitals: TURN A PROFIT. There, Julien, the son of a carpenter who owns a sawmill, reads in secret and is beaten by his father, and the book he values most, the Memorial of Saint Helena, falls into the stream (Book I, ch. 4, Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado). There he makes the cold sum that ends in "one has to be a priest" (ch. 5), lives the night in the garden when he forgets to pretend (ch. 9), and shouts in the woods that he has won a battle (ch. 10).

Notice what this means for whoever skips. Several of the passages the lecture quotes, the priest's sum, the garden, the battle, are in these chapters that seem to lead nowhere. Whoever skips Verrières reaches the rest of the book without the rule with which Julien sees the world, and will find the ladders and pistols that come later strange. Whoever reads it already knows that, for him, nothing is only what it seems: a raise in salary is a battle won. One way to get through the slow part is to read each character by the narrator's rule: what does this earn, and for whom?

Second stall: Mathilde's back and forth

In the second book an on-again, off-again love story appears: now I love you, now I no longer love you, but can it be that he has already forgotten me? Many people close the book there.

The lecture's advice is to change the question you put to the text. When you reach that part, read it as a battle, not as a love story. In each chapter, ask who is winning. You will see that this is exactly how the two of them read each other.

The book supports this reading. Mathilde, the Marquis de La Mole's daughter, bored and proud, decides to love Julien the way one chooses a role, and asks him to climb to her room by a ladder. Julien climbs with a pistol in his hand, more frightened than in love, suspicious of a trap. A Russian prince teaches him the recipe for winning her: pretend not to care, court another woman, and copy love letters handed over ready-made. The book calls this Russian politics, which is not state politics but the politics of seduction. And the narrator sums up the difference between Julien's two women in a single sentence: Madame de Rênal found reasons to do what her heart dictated, and Mathilde, the girl from high society, lets her heart be moved only after finding good reasons for being moved (Book II, ch. 30).

Understood this way, the swing stops being endless indecision and becomes a game. Each "now I love you, now I don't" is a move made by two players who do not know how to lower their guard. Read the chapter, ask who advanced and who retreated, and what seemed like stalling takes on a direction.

Why go through both

The lecture sums up the gain in a short sentence: with this map in hand, the book moves. And there is a reason not to close it in the middle. The same logic of campaign that organizes Verrières and the Paris salon reaches a point where victory does not last two days: Julien receives the lieutenant's commission, the red, the uniform he so wanted, and two days later already calculates that he needs more (Book II, ch. 35). Further on, in the cell, the book turns inside out and Julien loses his ambition all at once. Whoever closed the novel in Paris misses exactly this change of direction, which is in The ending of The Red and the Black.

A simple test: the first chapter

The lecture's invitation is modest. If the video made you want to read the book, read the first chapter, the one that seems to lead nowhere, and decide afterward. And if you have not chosen an edition yet, the one that goes with the lecture, with the same words as the quotations, is the Penguin Companhia edition, the subject of Which Portuguese Translation of The Red and the Black?

Continue: What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about · Which Portuguese Translation of The Red and the Black? · The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell · Psalm 51: the penitent's prayer
Source class: O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal