{"id":793,"date":"2015-05-14T19:30:36","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T17:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/?p=793"},"modified":"2020-05-31T00:09:30","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T22:09:30","slug":"die-kameliendame-alexandre-dumas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/2015\/05\/the-lady-of-the-camellias-alexandre-dumas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lady of the Camellias \u2022 Alexandre Dumas"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

This book spent some time on my wish list, and in retrospect I\u2019m not quite sure why it took me so long to finally pick it up. A book with the name Alexandre Dumas<\/em> on the cover has never disappointed me\u2014though in this case it isn\u2019t the author of The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em> or The Three Musketeers<\/em>, but his son, Alexandre Dumas, known as Dumas fils.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It had been a long time since a book moved me so deeply, gripped me so completely, and carried me away emotionally. A moving love story almost always gets to me\u2014yet when it\u2019s as deft and as genuine as it is here, my empathy becomes my undoing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I love society novels and can never get enough of them. The doings of high society, the multi-layered dialogues that never follow a formula but keep surprising you and are a pleasure to follow\u2014these books are gripping in their own way. The glimpses of a society\u2019s interpersonal relations in a time that feels remarkably tangible today\u2014that is a joy to read.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

And so this story, too, set in mid-19th-century Paris, follows a young man who moves in the best circles. Armand Duval, the protagonist, meets the beautiful courtesan Marguerite Gautier and falls in love with her. A love that doesn\u2019t fit the social norms\u2014for courtesans are an accepted part of that world only in their prescribed role as mistresses. So this book also contains a good measure of social critique, typical of the period, in which this order was repeatedly called into question. In that, it strongly recalls Effi Briest<\/em>, Madame Bovary<\/em>, or Anna Karenina<\/em>\u2014unsurprising, since it also belongs to Realism, with its sharpened focus on the individual and the longing one senses for personal freedom. A social perspective that hardly strikes us today, dulled as we are by the constant lull of advertising and industry\u2014these books remind us it wasn\u2019t always so.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But none of that is what affected me so strongly here. It\u2019s the way Dumas brings love\u2014no, headlong infatuation\u2014to life. Everyone has fallen in love in one way or another; everyone knows that intense feeling that can seize you and take over your mind and body, that can lift you uncompromisingly to unimagined heights and also plunge you into deepest sorrow. The doubts, the hope, the intoxication\u2014and no matter how that infatuation ended, in love, in nothing, or somewhere in between\u2014we know the feeling and we have an insatiable longing for it. With this novel Dumas managed to awaken that feeling in me\u2014or the memory of it\u2014and weave it into his story. And because I\u2019m sure I\u2019m far from alone in that, the novel became so successful.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How does Dumas do it? I think it\u2019s several things. For one, he modeled the love story on his own affair with the courtesan Marie Duplessis. Of course Dumas embellished his liaison with Marie, but at its core\u2014especially in Armand Duval\u2019s emotions\u2014you sense a great deal of Dumas himself. Allegedly he wrote the book in just four weeks, which would suggest he wanted to get fresh thoughts and feelings onto paper quickly\u2014perhaps to get over his love story. But that\u2019s speculation; who can say? What\u2019s certain is that he builds the emotions between the two with mastery and transmits them to the reader.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Second, the familiar first-person narration creates great intimacy. The protagonist reports from his own perspective, but Marguerite, too, offers direct access to her feelings\u2014both in what she says and what she writes. You feel as if you\u2019re living through all the highs and lows together with Armand and Marguerite. The characters\u2019 thoughts are understandable\u2014even if I wouldn\u2019t have acted the same way in every situation, their decisions feel plausible.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

A third device is the clear, direct way Dumas describes feelings and circumstances. He doesn\u2019t mince words and often seems to say exactly what the reader feels.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For if someone had said to me, \u201cToday you shall possess this woman, and tomorrow you will already be dead,\u201d I would have been ready. But had they said, \u201cGive ten louis and you shall be her lover,\u201d I would have refused and wept like a child who wakes to see the castle of his night\u2019s dream vanish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Aside from its setting, you never feel as if you\u2019re holding a \u201cclassic\u201d when you read this book. The sentences are pleasant to read, and the first-person perspective makes for a smooth flow. Judging by his father\u2019s books, I have to say the son is in no way inferior to him. Passages in The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em> captivated me in a similar way.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Conclusion:<\/strong> The Lady of the Camellias<\/em> (La Dame aux Cam\u00e9lias<\/em>) is, even by today\u2019s standards, absolutely worth reading\u2014not only for lovers of classics, but especially for those who don\u2019t want a 1,500-page tome yet still want to dive into an outstanding, captivating society novel from the era of Realism. The love story cast a powerful spell on me, and I could feel the infatuation almost within reach. Love stories of this quality are rare; for that alone, this book is a masterpiece. If you make the mistake of leaving it on your wish list as long as I did, be warned: you might regret it later.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Book information: <\/strong>The Lady of the Camellias<\/em> \u2022 Alexandre Dumas fils \u2022 dtv Verlag \u2022 272 pages \u2022 ISBN 9783423137089<\/p>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book spent some time on my wish list, and in retrospect I\u2019m not quite sure why it took me so long to finally pick it up. A book with the name Alexandre Dumas on the cover has never disappointed me\u2014though in this case it isn\u2019t the author of The Count of Monte Cristo or … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Lady of the Camellias \u2022 Alexandre Dumas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"Die Kameliendame \u2022 Alexandre Dumas - lesestunden","description":"Dieses Buch war einige Zeit auf meiner Wunschliste und im Nachhinein wei\u00df ich nicht so recht, wieso es so lange gedauert hat, bis ich es mir endlich g"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,20],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-reviews","tag-alexandre-dumas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/dumas_die_kameliendame.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}