Manette Salomon by Edmond De Goncourt

Manette Salomon by Edmond De Goncourt

I received both volumes at eleven o'clock this morning and I've just finished them. In other words, my dear fellows, Manette Salomon has enraptured me for an entire day. It's stunning, dazzling, intoxicating. I have tears in my eyes. So I must unleash these feelings on you, without pausing to sort them out first.

So wrote Flaubert, in a letter to the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt on November 13th, 1867. And his enthusiasm was certainly not unfounded, for Manette Salomon, here superbly translated for the first time into English by Tina Kover, is undoubtedly one of the greatest novels about art ever written, sitting easily between Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece and Zola's L'Oeuvre--the latter novel Edmond de Goncourt even going so far as to say was nothing but a rewriting of Manette Salomon.

This is one of the masterpieces of European literature--a panorama of the world of the painters of France during the mid-nineteenth century--the schools, the studios, the salons--the successes and failures, the magnificent inspirations and the crushing disillusions of the artists.

EDMOND DE GONCOURT (1822-1896) and JULES DE GONCOURT (1830-1870) spent the majority of their lives in Paris. Having attended the finest schools, the Goncourts formed one of the most famous literary partnerships. After an unsuccessful novel and some attempts at drama, they began publishing books on various aspects of art and society in eighteenth-century France. Between 1860 and 1869 the brothers published six novels which they described as history which might have taken place and which were as carefully documented as their historical works.

ROBERT BALDICK was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He wrote a number of histories and biographies, and translated the works of a wide range of French author. He was a joint editor of Penguin Classics and one of Britain's leading French scholars until his death in 1972.

GEOFF DYER is the author of three novels, a critical study of John Berger, and four genre-defying titles. He lives in London.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9782070387991
ISBN 10	2070387992
Title	Manette Salomon
Author	Edmond De Goncourt
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Gallimard
Year published	2000-01-01
Number of pages	629
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.