The Ambassadors
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Narrated by:
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John Chancer
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By:
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Henry James
About this listen
In the second novel of Henry James' celebrated late period, American Lambert Strether is sent to Paris on behalf of Mrs. Newsome, his fiancée, to collect her son, Chad. When Strether finds Chad, he discovers an altered man and becomes introduced to a free and unconventional style of life that soon intoxicates him. His views begin to change; the morality of Woollett, his hometown, becomes foreign, and the "ambassador" loses sight of his mission.... Part tragedy, part comedy, The Ambassadors is a rewarding portrait about one man's late awakening.
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Couldn't stop listening
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By: Edith Wharton
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The Gambler
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The Gambler is a psychologically probing novel concerning the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexis Ivanovitch, a young gambling addict; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers; and other characters. Narrated by Alexis, this short novel is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's own experiences as a compulsive gambler.
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Great book, great narration, proper pronunciation
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Thus Bad Begins
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Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost, and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate.
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Fascinating plot, superb performance, psychological depth
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The Ladies of Rosings Park
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Chapter by chapter, these ladies of Rosings Park take turns telling the tale from the moment Elizabeth Bennet sets foot in Hunsford, changing everything. Is Anne heartbroken or relieved to discover Mr. Darcy will never marry her? As an heiress, even a sickly one, she must have other suitors. Does Lady Catherine gracefully accept the defeat of her original plan or keep conniving? Will Anne’s health ever improve? And what really happened to her father?
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NOT Jane Austen
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A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.'s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves.
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A masculine and coquettish reading
- By Alan on 05-27-12
By: Franz Kafka
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Jennie Gerhardt
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Jennie Gerhardt is the tragic story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from an extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs with two different men from a much higher social class. How members of her family, the family of one of the wealthy men, and society in general react to her situation is the basis of this classic story.
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Need a pick me up.
- By knvmxi on 05-15-16
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The Woman in White
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Through a series of calculated moves that involve death and a large inheritance, a small community is rocked and shrouded in mystery at the hands of the conniving Sir Percival Glyde, who is interested only in making himself wealthy at the hands of others.... Celebrated as one of the first popular mystery novels, The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, skillfully incorporates the twisting and turning of more than a few plot lines that all manage to converge beautifully at the end of the work.
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horrible technically - echoes at most of the words
- By James D. Coburn on 12-30-15
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Sanditon
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Had Jane Austen lived to complete Sanditon, it would have been as treasured as her other novels. In the half-finished masterpiece, Austen fashions one of her classic heroines: Charlotte Heywood. The surviving fragment also sets the story well on its path as Charlotte begins an adventure to Sanditon where a full cast of characters becomes intertwined in various intrigues.
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There is a reason Jane didn't finish this book
- By ELEANOR FOWSER on 06-21-14
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Highly recommended
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terrible recording
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A satire that turns tragic
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The king of all the narrators
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From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of "the sisterhood of women". She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes, and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, veteran of the Civil War, with rigid views concerning society and women's place therein. Is the lovely, lighthearted Verena made for public movements or private passions?
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insightful and intricate portrayal of women from multiple perspectives in history of womens suffrage movement
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The Dean of Innuendo weaves a tale of a complex romantic quadrangle when a wealthy collector of objets d'arte and his daughter innocently marry a pair of lovers, the beautiful Charlotte and a charming Italian prince. Complications ensue.
By: Henry James
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What Maisie Knew
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Following a violent and messy divorce, young Maisie Farange floats back and forth between her parents, Beale and Ida, who use her as a weapon to torment each other in their ongoing, internecine war. Eventually the parents both remarry, and it becomes clear that the new spouses care more for Maisie than her own parents. Beale and Ida soon embark on a series of extramarital affairs, leaving Maisie in the care of the new step-parents, who begin their own affair with each other.
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Not a book for Audible
- By Mitzi on 06-22-20
By: Henry James
What listeners say about The Ambassadors
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Laura J. Hunt
- 06-06-23
Clever and Funny
A book so different from any I’ve ever read, but delightful, charming and … well … wonderful!
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- brenda engel
- 05-13-20
A treat for the listener
this is an extraordinary reading of a late master piece of Henry James. Highly recommended.
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- Michael
- 05-21-19
Interesting but unfulfilling
This was listed 27th on the Modern Library 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. I can understand this in a kind of abstract way. The writing and subject were interesting, modern, and unusual. I don't find that this has aged very well. The main character is an American small town fellow sent to Paris to retrieve a wayward younger man, and instead discovers the limits of his own experience and comes to question his conventional wisdom.
The writing is narrated from the protagonists point-of-view, and we see him slowly change. Yet, it was quite difficult for me to immerse myself in the characters or story. The characters' dialog is a bit abstracted, as if in (a very long) play. Post-Me-Generation readers may have trouble bonding with the protagonist's challenge of finding himself in Paris. It felt as if this book were written for the author, as self-therapy, without much consideration of other readers. I found this interesting and was glad I read it, but would not read it again, nor recommend it to most readers.
The narration is mostly clear, but the pacing is stilted, the female voices are weak, and editing left in several mistakes/repeats.
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6 people found this helpful
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- EL
- 03-18-24
opaque even for Henry James
Really annoying and baffling lack of directness in dialogue and plot along with some sublime insight and description once in a while.
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- David C.
- 06-24-19
The Heart of Parisian Darkness
In certain ways, Henry James was like the Seinfeld of his time. Not because he was a brilliant comedian so much as he beautifully and artistically wrote about nothing. It really is to bad that his stuff, even the Ambassadors which is supposedly his most clever, just isn't funny.
The only reason I am reading Henry James is because his works are included in the list of the Top 100 novels of the Modern Library. In fact, "The Wings of the Dove" and "The Ambassadors" are ranked #26 and #27 (and The Golden Bowl" is still to come at #32). And I keep enduring because the critics rave about his work and I just keep hoping that, at some point, a lightbulb will illuminate inside my head and I'll get it.
But I don't.
Henry James is a wordsmith of the tedious and tired. I should be interested about the trials and travails of Americans "abroad on the continent" at the turn of the century because I have read so many biographies of my countrymen escaping the priggish, Victorian confines of America to pursue both art and science in the modern capitols of Europe. And yet, somehow, James has made me loathe and despise these people as wearing and loathesome creatures too calculating, self conscious and disinclined to straight speak to the point that I want to wallop each and every one of them with a croquet mallet.
Look, all writers have verbal crutches but I got so accustomed to James' overwrought style that I could tell the moment he was about to have a character "hang fire" a paragraph before he had them do so. I am not sure if he is just madly in love with American idiom and just feels the need to "Jamesplain" every American catch phrase as if the reader couldn't figure out for themselves that, yes, this is indeed an American turn of phrase.
"The Ambassadors" is at least relatively more entertaining than "The Wings of the Dove" which were penned a year apart. These were in his later years while he had settled in Sussex, England where he wrote the three novels I am conscribed to endure.
It struck me, as I was wading through "The Ambassadors" that there was something familiar about the story which centers around a magazine editor from Massachusetts being dispatched by his fiancee, who also happens to be the magazine's owner, to Paris to retrieve her errant son who seems to have been "caught up" in the Parisian lifestyle, very likely in the clutches of "a woman." His seemingly straight forward mission, to terminate the lad's Parisian foray, becomes complicated as the messenger finds himself getting caught up in Parisian life as well.
And then it struck me.
Heart of Darkness.
James was retelling Joseph Conrad's tale, exchanging the Belgian Congo for the foreboding gardens of the Tuilieries. I have found no similar literary comparison however, "Heart of Darkness" was originally published as a serial in 1899 in the British Blackwood's Magazine and as a novel in 1902. James began work on "The Ambassadors" in 1900, serialized in Boston's North American Review in 1903 and novelized later that year. "Heart of Darkness" was not much acclaimed when first published. Interestingly, Conrad wrote a glowing academic appraisal of the works of Henry James in 1905 whose works he boasted as holding a prominent place on his bookshelf. Perhaps Conrad was hinting at such a thought himself as this passage from his review of James' work could suggest.
"I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring."
Perhaps I read too much into Conrad's analysis. Perhaps he was a gushing appreciant of James' work.
Or, through his effusive praise, perhaps Conrad was saying a lot about nothing to hint that the fountain of his creativity flowed from the dark waters of the Congo previously navigated by Conrad himself.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Rumpuscat
- 02-20-22
Step away from the microphone
At their best, audio recordings can make difficult material more accessible, and the best actor/readers have a feel for the authors they bring to life: Timothy West reading Anthony Trollope's novels, for example. Henry James is a difficult writer, to be sure. But there is no excuse for a narrator not to understand the words and sentences he reads or to read so poorly as to make the story inaccessible to the listener.
John Chancer is a very poor reader of this novel. He doesn't understand James's syntax or his rhythms. His reading is largely expressionless and so fails to convey nuance, which is fatal to Henry James. He seems not to have read the novel prior to his performance and he reads as if he doesn't know the characters and is unfamiliar with the arc of the story. For example, he voices the character of little Bilham with a high voice, as if the character were small. The text explains the epithet by observing, among other things, that "little" is Bilham's middle name. He is an important -- and strong -- character in the novel, but not in this rendition.
The Ambassadors is the most straightforward of the novels known as "late" James, but it is still demanding and requires a substantial commitment on the part of any reader. It's wonderful when we can listen to a book read by an actor who has mastered accents and registers. But meaning is fundamental. That's why we read, and it's also why we listen. And that is where a performance has to start.
Naxos might want to clean up the odd repeated sentence in the recording. And the pdf file that accompanies the audio file bears no relationship to the divisions in the recording and so is worthless to the Audible listener.
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1 person found this helpful