The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)

55 year old Lambert Strether is on a quest. His "fiance", Mrs. Newsome, who happens to be rich if not beautiful, has given him the task of retrieving her wayward son Chad from the clutches of a femme fatale in Paris, France. It's an implied condition that if Strether cannot convince Chad to come home and take over the family business, there will be no marriage to Mrs. Newsome back in Massachusetts.Strether arrives in Paris thinking that he will find Chad debauched by women, wine, and song but is greatly surprised to find him flourishing and in fact improved from the shallow boy he once knew. He is more of a gentleman with a sophisticated mind and tastes. The harpy destroyer of his innocence, Madame de Vionnet, turns out to be an elegant and charming woman who is currently separated from her husband. Strether can't figure out if Chad is in love with Vionnet our her young daughter, or if he is in love with neither.Ironically, the more time Strether spends in Paris hanging out with Chad and his coterie, the more Strether HIMSELF doesn't want to return home to the States! He begins to realize that he hasn't really ever had time to experience and enjoy life and maybe it's not to late to find a small bit of happiness in Paris among young minds and art.Henry James himself ranked this novel as his best so I thought it would be a great place to try reading his work for the first time. Unfortunately, this book is from his "late period" which means its language is a lot more convoluted and dense and can be a bit hard to understand coming into it unaware as I did. The experience to me was closest to reading Shakespeare for the first time. At points all through this book I would read 2-3 pages and the realize that I had no idea what had just occurred. And I consider myself an above average reader. A casual reader would lose interest in this book in the first few pages. As you start reading you catch the broad strokes of the action and you have to use context clues not to infer meaning from individual words but whole sections of text.The great thing was that the more of the book you read, the more beautiful it becomes because your mind starts to get used to the style and is able to decode the meaning of the text. By the end of the book, the language and sentence construction no longer bothered me and I was able to greatly enjoy it.I would say the main conflict of the book is Strether's regret. The fact that at 55, he starts to question his life choices and for the first time, he begins to think about what he wants to do with his life. Fortunately for him, within the confines of this novel, he discovers that maybe he still has TIME to sort out his future. Does he want to go home and marry Mrs Newsome, does he want to stay in Paris and get together with one of the other women he has met, or does he want to stay single? He's ended up middle aged, repressed, depressed, and dull, but at least the author gives Strether the opportunity to make something of his inner life even at this late stage in his life. You'll have to read the book to see if Strether seizes the opportunity he's been given.

While Henry James' favorite of his own novels, The Ambassadors (1903), in my opinion as well as E.M. Forster's, doesn't quiet live up to the genius of The Wings of the Dove (1902) or even the earlier The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The familiar James themes are all there--the American abroad, American reactions to European culture, exploration of the terrain of the life unlived--but missing is the truly ecstatic prose and characters with remarkable psychological depth that distinguish the finest of James' works.The narrative follows "ambassador" Lambert Strether to Paris in pursuit of his widowed fiancée, Mrs. Newsome's, son Chad--whom she believes to be romantically involved with an undesirable woman. Strether's mission is to extricate the wayward youth and return with him to Massachusetts directly. Once in Paris, however, Strether falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming companion, Madame de Vionnet. The summer wears on with little correspondence between Strether and the Newsomes waiting at home. Impatient to see her son returned and suitably married, Mrs. Newsome sends yet another envoy, Chad's cynical sister Sarah Pocock, to confront the errant Chad and a Strether whose view of the world has changed profoundly. In the end, it is Strether who prevents Chad from returning to America.The highlight of the text is certainly Strether's speech to Chad's friend Little Bilham in Book Fifth, in which he gives voice to his new sense of things: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!" It is an expanded vision of life, an affirmation that seems an appealing climax to Strether's confrontation with the realities of his circumstance. The sentiments of Strether's speech, however, are tested in the remaining two-thirds of the narrative.

The prose in The Ambassadors isn't so much "written" as "crafted". James pushes the English language to near its limits for complexity of sentence construction, with multiple thoughts often nested into a single sentence. Fortunately for the reader, deciphering the prose is made easier by the fact that the vocabulary employed is generally accessible and commonplace. I'm not a particularly quick reader to begin with, and I had to read this book at perhaps half my normal pace (re-reading many sentences to boot) in order to glean most of what was being said. Most, not all; there were quite a few clauses I simply couldn't pick the meaning out of. But I got 99% of it and that was enough for me to hold this work in the highest regard and consider it one of the finest novels I've ever read.No need to summarize the plot as other reviews here have already done so (with spoilers a plenty I might add). The story had me rooting for the protagonist Strether from the start and made the book difficult to put down. It's easy to sympathize with his predicament; he's conflicted between his natural desire for self-preservation and his reluctance to force Chad to do something against his will.Characterization is brilliant particularly after the Pococks arrive due to the clashes of personalities & motives.The only nit I'd pick is that when contrasting Europe & America, James leaves the impression that anyone visiting France could find the right well-connected tour guide, jump into high society, and experience the Old World in that environment. The reality is this tiny stratum of French society is only accessible to very few and could not be experienced directly by most readers; the Old World in the novel isn't painted faithfully.

Ich lese zwar sehr viele englische Bücher, aber dieses Buch musste ich nach einiger Zeit weglegen .Ich kenne vom selben Autor:"Washington Square" und es hat mir gut gefallen . Offensichtlich kann er auch weniger "sophisticated".Finde es nett, dass Sie nachfragen !Mit Gruß,E. Trzesniowski

I wanted to give Henry James another try, and I'm enjoying the Golden Bowl much more. His aim in life seems to be dense sentence compositions and creation of a confusing dialogue structure that makes you wonder who the heck is talking! It's needlessly complicated, not my favourite of his...

This is not the Ambassadors by Henry James. It appears to be some strange corruption of the original text - almost as if it was translated into another language and then translated back into English. It makes no sense and is DEFINITELY not Henry James' original novel. DO NOT BUY.

Englisjh writing is very difficult to understand but the book is very high standard and worth to try to read with perseverance.

作者らしい所が十分出ている部分もそうでない部分もある。個人的にこの作者ならこうあって欲しいというレベルよりは中庸に感じられるので4つ星