The Chateau
by William Maxwell
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 35)
I'm giving this book to my mother for Christmas. I stumbled on it while looking for information about Chateau Beaumesnil, which we visited last summer. It's a charming place, known as the Versailles of Normandy, but it's not nearly as grand as Versailles, and has a rather faded elegance.
The blurb on the back of the book describes it as "a sage and luminously observed novel of Americans abroad. It is 1948, and a battered France is just beginning to receive its first American tourists since...more
The blurb on the back of the book describes it as "a sage and luminously observed novel of Americans abroad. It is 1948, and a battered France is just beginning to receive its first American tourists since...more
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Despite my fascination with The New Yorker, I only found out about this writer through the TLS (and had to buy it at the time from Amazon.co.uk) and it sounded like the perfect book to buy for an upcoming trip to France. Maxwell's gentle prose and nostalgic story grabbed me at a time when I was no longer reading many novels and I fell completely in love with it.
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Read in January, 2005
It's about a newlywed couple traveling in France just after the Second World War, and especially fabulous to read if you, too, are living in Europe and interacting with Europeans. And Maxwell is kind of wonderfully wild with point of view, if I'm remembering rightly.
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in May, 2008
Mmmmmm... a perfect depiction of miscommunications and misunderstandings between cultures and languages. Lacks passion, humor, or illicitation of any feelings other then "oh, that's too bad for them." Forgettable?
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Two Americans visit France and grow to love it in a summer shortly after WW2. I love Maxwell's elegant, Jamesian writing. This is a short, simple story made luminous by the writer.
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in September, 2007
Well. There are some nice delicate touches about human complexity and what not, but it's all a bit too delicate. And dull. Yes, dull. That'd cover it.
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