That's it. I must accept this. I am chronically unable to understand what he's actually saying. It's as though he is writing in a language I haven't studied; some sort of pidgin that throws in a few words of English here and there. I freely admit defeat, and add James-lexia to my store of Kafkaphobia and Joyce-pathia.

Henry James has taken circumlocution and obfuscation to new heights in this novel. I don’t often rate a book an ungenerous two stars, but this novel was in many ways an impossible book for me. I appreciate the architecture of James’s novel: the beauty of Paris as a backdrop for temporarily exiled Americans to meet and discover, or not, the underlying theme: ‘knowing how to live’. But I never felt the intended drama, or the sudden discovery of self, partly because I nearly drowned in James’s nebu...

Catching up with the classics # 20I️ am not a fan, but I️ WILL finishI hate this book. I'm never going to finish thisFor god sake! I read this entire book with the main male character, Strether, making everything his business, for him only at the end to say that that none of it his his business. WTH was this book about then, James????? You must have been paid by the prepositional phrase! And had no editor to tell you that most of your novel was extraneous. I finally threw up my hands when you wr...

Lambert Strether, the needy editor of a little New England literary magazine, is sent to Paris by his patroness, wealthy Mrs. Newsome. His mission as "ambassador" or emissary for the Newsome family is to fetch the wayward heir Chad and return him to the USA to work in the family business. Strether's presumed reward upon successful completion of his mission, would be marriage to his rich patroness. During a stopover in England, Strether meets Maria Gostrey who acts as a guide for the innocent Ame...

A Perched PrivacyI finish reading this novel feeling exalted and cowed by what a man may accomplish in a work of fiction. Human relationships, so various, so changing, so beautiful, are so variously, changeably and beautifully conceived here that they constitute a cause for moral uplift and terror. Flying from an apparent bedrock of ethical certainties, fine discriminations flutter in the air, and cannot find a sure place to land. All (a word that punctuates the novel like an orgasmic cry) is gu...

An eternal situation. When I lived in Paris the worried mum of an American girl arrived to get her back to the US. Her daughter, a close friend then, had developed, in one year, a style and manner -- a chic, if you will, far beyond her suburban Baltimore roots. She soon had a romcom with a visiting, married US pol that resulted in a Paris abortion, which we treated w hilarity, and, after a 3d year, returned to America and married. She now lives in the midwest. Is that Jamesian or not?It's not,...

Yeah, so reading this novel is basically like driving through Indiana. That's the analogy I'm going to use. It's like driving through Indiana. You know, it's long, it's generally boring. You start drifting off. Instead of focusing on the road, you're mind begins to wander. You tell yourself to stay focused, but that doesn't work, because now you're just thinking about staying focused, you're still not paying attention to the road. But then once you get through it, once you're out of Indiana, you...

If I've figured the one thing about this novel for certain, that it is not a realistic novel. At least not in the sense of the 19th century. The people populating it are not real. Lets take the main character Lewis Lambert Strether (even the name is ridiculous). He arrives to Paris from Woollett, Massachusetts to fetch Chad, the son of his fiancé and the heir of a manufacturing empire on her request. He appears at the same time the man of great imagination and fantastically perceptive man at tha...

Reading The Ambassadors is like progressing through a circular maze. The reader roams around the edges at first, coming up frequently against dead ends. Why is Chad Newsome so difficult to figure out? What are the author’s intentions for Maria Gostrey? Will Mrs Newsome, or even her more formidable-sounding daughter, Mrs Pocock, ever make a physical appearance in the story? The enigmas in this early stage are such that if the reader found herself accidentally back at the start she might be tempte...

Lewis Lambert Strether 55, a prim widower considers himself a failure completely dependent on the kindness of wealthy widow and still attractive Mrs.Newsome, from fictional Woollett, Massachusetts his fiancee for a living (set circa 1900) he's the editor of a small magazine review that is financed by her, owner of a company that manufactures.... it is never said in the novel. Sent by Mrs. Newsome ( thus the title ,"The Ambassadors," there will be others) to get her son the immature Chad(wick) 28...

A curious reading experience, and, in the end, a remarkable one. After banging my head against the first two hundred pages of this novel over several weeks, something suddenly clicked in. Was it James's bizarre, flourishing syntax? Or the sudden realization that this is a simple plot, presented complexly? Was it to understand that, though we're in the 3rd person, we're deeply in the head of our protagonist, Strether, a character who is almost uniquely unreliable in his inability to think things

Come nearer, Odysseus,Flower of all Greek warriors,Bring your ship to rest, and hear our song.Our voices are as sweet as honey in the comb,And all things are known to us - all things that happened before Troy -And all things that shall come to pass upon the fruitful earth.- Homer, Odyssey, The Sirens’ Song.And the Sirens in the Aegean, for us, echo those of the serpent to Adam and Eve: “I will make you as gods among men,” at the foot of the Tree of Good & Evil.I have struggled to grasp the ratio...

It is important to remember that Henry James's later works (his "major phase") are very much the roots of "modern literature" (whatever that means), and should be read in the same way as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway: which is to say: slowly savored. James himself was cognizant of this and admonished his readers to read only five pages a day (a challenge which I found impossible, but rather read in small-ish bits over each day). In B...

I have been reading quite a bit of James. Last year, I audio’d The Bostonians and Washington Square. I read The Aspen Papers, reread Beast in the Jungle, and read Turn of the Screw (which I disliked -- found it excruciating). And then this spring read a large collection of James’ stories (ed. Fadiman), then Wings of the Dove, and now The Ambassadors. I love the late James... Even though these books are long, and there is a certain degree of artificiality in the dialogue (much worse in Dove; much...