When Strether travels to Paris in order to rescue his fiancée's son (if Mrs Newsome is not Strether's fiancée, then I understood this book less than I thought) from an undesirable situation involving a dubious woman (or so everybody thinks), he thinks he will be able to control everything. Only that, he's not counting on Chad Newsome's cunning, some women's charms and, of course, Paris with its marvels. And nothing will go according to plan.

This is the general view of what this book is about; its meanders are a tad more twisted. This is what I call a very difficult book. Henry James has a verbose writing style that is completely unbearable: I had a really hard time getting into the book, understanding what was happening. Because I felt he was writing about nothing in particular. Lot's of words for nothing. The dialogues were likewise: sentences unfinished, a lot of empty talk, and, for me the best (worst) of it all, characters laughing in answer to other's questions. It was almost a nightmare. I had, sometimes, to go back and read a sentence again. And again. Until I understood it. Sometimes that happened with whole paragraphs. Which is not fun and takes off the whole pleasure of reading.

So, I didn't like this book and could barely understand it. I have another Henry James book waiting to be read; honestly, I'm not really looking forward to do it anytime soon.

This is the most difficult James I have read yet. Unlike his other books, "The Ambassadors" was not easy and engaging. I feel like this book was dedicated to a pursuit of complexity in conversation - I regularly reread passages to understand his meaning. Despite that and perhaps because of this conversational bent, the book itself is immensely enjoyable. It was like reading a play - there is a great deal of time devoted to setting scenes and frames of mind, internal soliloquys, and copious interaction between characters. It was structured such that one cannot see the end from the beginning. This is not to say the end is a surprise, more that any of a number of endings would not surprise. In this sense the book incorporates an element of reality, as choices and events often shape the future. James even mocks the 'fictional' in his work at a miraculously chance pivotal meeting near the end of the book. James' tendency to amuse himself as he writes is one the most endearing aspects of his work.

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 that. He manages to read the romantic intention of a young girl by watching her for a few minutes standing on the balcony. At the same time, he misses something which is dead obvious in other romantic relationship he is in charge to actually break. Lets take Chad, his charge. That man, we are told, has greatly improved in Europe, has become refined and “beautiful”. But he acts as an infantile and not very bright moron. And I am not even talking about a bunch of very strong-willed, but weirdly disoriented women cast (that is apart from the ones from Whoollett). So in short, the characters can be both: perceptive and simpleminded, daft and refined, free-will and puritanic. Such characters do not exit in realism, but they do in modernism and even in post-modernism.

So, this book, I think is just a game for James. He cannot be bothered with realism or true psychological depth when he plays his comedy. It is also made obvious with the famous question: what is that the manufacturing empire producing? The multiple generation of the readers keep guessing until now. He has teased people with that somewhere at the beginning of the novel. But I seriously doubt James knows himself. That is not the point. And I guess, if one would not share his sardonic, slightly evil sense of humour, this book might become a torture.

I found the dialogues very funny. The blanks in them, the repetitions, the expletives. It is difficult to convey what i mean without a huge quote. But for example, the use and overuse of the words like “wonderful”, “beautiful” “deep” (in the context of a person) or sharp (in the context of the situation) might indicate the narrowness of James’s sensual vocabulary. We know it could not be further from the case. Some people would be irritated. But it made me smile - again someone else is being wonderful!

Is it the first novel addressing middle-life crisis? I’ve read somewhere that the term has not been coined until the 60s of the 20th century. But our lovely Strether has come to Paris to experience it and he jolly well does. I do not know whether it sounded revolutionary in 1904. Many people, especially of a male gender come to a certain age and try to regain whatever was missed earlier, often in a romantic sphere. It is described poignantly here but again the situations constantly border the comic ones: he “relapsed into the sense- which had for him in these days most of the comfort - that he was free to believe in anything that from hour to hour kept him going.” It is a great sentence, isn’t it? On the one level, it is a perfect life philosophy. On the other, it is simple wishful thinking. So, it depends on the user very much.

Sometimes i felt that while writing James was not quite sure where he was going to end with all of this. And that let me down somewhat as I was primed on suspense and psychological depth of his short stories. I expected the powerful twist at the end. It has come. But the power of it was actually in the banality of the revelation. Was it James’s strength on this occasion? I am not sure. But I think what was definitely very strong in the novel was leaving a lot of open possibilities at the very end. Since I came up with my perceived “what happened next”, I’ve read very different perceived ends from the others. And this is what I appreciate the most in the novels.

And now, the sentences. One certainly need to work on them. Though after the first 20 pages or so it is becoming much easier. Some of them are truly beautiful as only a language can be:

This one is about Paris: “the vast bright Babylon. like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.” In general, the sense of place in the book is magic.

And not all of them are so long. This one is almost Joycean: “He only glowered grandly at the tops of the old gables.”

But some of the sentences, while deciphered individually, do not come to much in terms of meaning. I guess it is not always the point. The idea has come to me quite late in the book to listen to it on audio. And yes, it is great. These sentences flow audibly with all musicality of the language. And the dialogues stood out as well. I might listen to the whole book one day.

I am new to James. I liked this novel a lot. But it did not beat for me “Aspern papers” and other stories in the only other book by him I’ve read before so far The Aspern Papers and Other Tales. Those were “deeper” using the one of James’s favourite words in this book. This novel is clearly not for everyone. But it could very entertaining for the right sort of a reader.

Oh my goodness, there was so much to quote! Do have a look:

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Thank you to all the #James24 #HenryJames #TheAmbassadors readers! This has been a busy read! Truly grateful to you all!!!❤️❤️❤️

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 rationale that drives this book for nearly two years, and - now that I have - I see that it is a pivotal book for everyone attempting to grasp the raison d'etre of our chaotic times (that's the sole reason for my Full rating).

It is simply the ethical malaise of our own postmodern hearts: the constant barrage of the Siren’s (or serpent’s) song.

A good deal of this novel's milieu has a Parisian locale. That is no accident, as Paris was the venue of James' coming-out-of-the-closet, as is clearly evinced in the recent insightful book, Henry James in Paris, and I recommend it for your followup.

Now, I'm fully hetero, but like all of us boomers who came of age in proximity to Flower Power, have fallen victim to its conditioning - its widespread line-blurring - to evolve into a guy of tolerant confusion. And that's the new normal.

Further, there are Damoclean swords above us all to safeguard our bemusement.

For James, therefore, it is an awakening. To many of us, it however must remain a typical Jamesian aporia.

So this novel is not an unmitigated success. F.R. Leavis, as always, is right.

Or was, once. But guess what? The lines EVERYWHERE now are blurred. That's what makes Misinformation successful.

We 'moral majority' - now - are confused constantly. The devil is in the details, and we are swamped on all sides by details.

That's why this book is a Must Read for literate people.

James Taylor has recently written and performed a song about old age: and that’s the point we Boomers are advancing to now.

And Taylor's advice is good -

We've GOT to at least enjoy our aging experience as a downhill ride!

And that's all Henry James is saying to us older folks.

The wild call of the Sirens is endemic to our decaying Age -

We may not like the way it’s dimming the lights of our civilisation -

But we've GOTTA appreciate - at a distance, for a small moment - the fact that our own Ride Down is synchronized with the Transvaluation of all Values:

And that we are called to be perhaps the last guardians of the Old Ways of grace in a new world where change is the name of the game, and where "Max Flex" is the slogan of the times...

And that the tacit adaptability of our Faith can enable its survival.

What a tremendous load of over-articulated crap.
The only reason to write such shite in the era of early Picasso, Freud, Einstein and many other giants of early 20th century is to try to carve out some sort of semblance of a reason to exist...when there really is none. It's one idiot writing about his brethren and sisters for his brethren and sisters. It was published as a serial in The North American Review for minor (read: wannabe) intellectuals in New England in 1903.
Truly an example of the blind leading the blind.

On top of that, the sentences...jeez.

Why is this anyhing but pulp for tissue?

??? 2000s: i discover i never wrote a review of this, over nine or so years ago when reading a selection of Henry James novels, early, middle, and late: The American, The Portrait of a Lady , and 'late' The Ambassadors . but then, perhaps, as an uneducated read, without much, rather necessary extensive reading- perhaps only now after reading much other, sometimes equally obfuscating sort of writing; the kind which tends towards poetry, that is, in which punctuation is no less important than choice or search for, in French terms 'le mot juste'- i do not remember actually enjoying torturous, often contradictory, if not simply opaque, reading of this text; which James himself apparently thought his best work, though he might qualify that with a few, perhaps incisive, perhaps further confusing clauses or determinations- or maybe he will just run out of punctuation...

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, really, because my friend truly lived without giving up anything. With James there must be melancholy...and a certain suffering. When writing his last celebrated 3 novels (this, plus "Wings" & "Bowl"), James, in his late 50s, finally admitted his pash for sculptor Hendrik Andersen ("I hold you long") and a certain warmth crept into the writing of this fine and lonely writer. The theme here is Live, all you can (later spoofed in "Auntie Mame") -- but what you remember is how Paris opened many to beauty and transformed them. It still happens.

The writing in this 400+ pager is flabby, as I see on a reread. Cut, pls, 200 pages. James (dictating) gets carried away by his own droning meanderings. Maybe he was slobbering over Andersen. Too many scholars elevate these 3 novels, forgetting the perfection of his short stories and novellas. Or the chilly wit in "The Awkward Age." (The dialogue in "The Ambassadors" is, at times, downright awful). So I am skipping any rating.

It's time for fresh, young scholars to study James. Happily, we have the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who published her piercing Jamesian ruminations in 1990 ("Epistemology of the Closet"). The finale to "The Ambassadors" betrays the conflicts within James, though it's marvelously spare. His hero, Lambert Strether, who has learned how to live, says farewell to his loyal, loving confidante Maria Gostrey -- because of integrity, says James; Strether failed in his mission abroad. This is poppycock. He says farewell because he simply isn't interested in her that way.

A gay friend of mine once put Henry James’ tendency to play hide and seek with the reader down to the same trait within himself with regards to his sexuality. Apparently he was deeply suspicious of everything that gave him pleasure. “Nothing came to him simply.” And in this novel nothing comes to us simply either.

I think it took me longer to read this than War and Peace. And that’s because virtually every sentence is like trying to figure out a rubic cube. There’s a moment when a character feels he is moving “in a maze of mystic closed allusions”. I couldn’t help wondering if Henry, not a renowned comedian, was having a laugh at the reader’s expense because that’s exactly what I felt as a reader during this novel. There were times when I was reminded of Nabokov and especially Ada, another novel that only inches open its door by degrees when we knock. So there’s something very modern about The Ambassadors. There’s a character who says, “Oh I don’t think anything now. That is but what I do think!” And this kind of mystification, these modifying clauses and sub clauses are a constant trait of this novel. Every sentence is a maze it takes two readings to get out of. It’d be easy to certify this novel as insane, an over-elaborate joke whose wit is lost on virtually everyone except the author, but once I managed to enter into its spirit of wilful obfuscation I began admiring it more and more. Communication, after all, is one of the major stumbling blocks in our lives. Every sentence delivered up to us contains numerous points of departure. To understand what’s communicated to us we simplify it and, as a result, often misrepresent it. Rarely is communication straightforward. We realise this most keenly when we are in love and find ourselves studying the words of the beloved with a metaphysical microscope. In a sense every character in this novel has the keyed up sensibility of the lover, both wilfully deflecting and hungrily truth seeking. The role of ambassador, like lover, is to mask the truth as often as to disclose it.

That said it baffled me when I read afterwards what Henry James thought was the defining passage of this book – “Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?” Is this novel an exhortation to live life to the full? I don’t understand how any character who circles around an answer to a simple question for four paragraphs could be seen as living life to full. In the time it takes the characters to arrive at any defining disclosure in this novel one could have caught the Eurostar to Paris and enjoyed lunch on the terrace of a brasserie. At times it was like a literary version of Big Brother – watching people who have nothing else to do but plot and unmask amorous or tactical alliances. Answers to questions in this novel always give rise to more questions. No one in fact seems capable of ever delivering up a clear answer to any question. There’s one instance where a character answers a question by saying, “Yes”, and then adding as an afterthought, “absolutely not”. Whatever anyone says is inevitably qualified, sometimes contradicted. At the end of every page you can feel you’re back at the beginning. Strether on whom all this elaborate subterfuge is enacted does gain our sympathy because in essence his plight is that of all of us – the struggle to make sense of the bigger picture with broken shards of incomplete information, like the archaeologist down in the trenches of a dig.

Interestingly James creates a world in which men are depicted as pawns for the queenly powers of women until the final stages of the game. There’s also a fantastic female villain who never once appears in the novel. As usual the poor, the downtrodden have no existence whatsoever in Henry James novels. An alien reading HJ might think all earthlings have unlimited leisure. And there’s a fabulous scene where Strether walks into the living reality of a painting he couldn’t afford to buy when he admired it in a Boston art gallery. This was one of the cleverest ways I’ve ever come across of showing how a character has made strides during the course of a narrative.

There’s no way on earth I’d recommend The Ambassadors and yet ultimately I found it an enriching experience, especially in what it has to say about the nature of communication. I also ultimately loved the war it wages on commercial fiction’s tendency to encourage skim reading onto the next twist in the plot. Just try skim reading this! And of course James, again like Nabokov, can write a dazzling sentence…

"Nessun privilegio del narratore di storie e del burattinaio é più delizioso, o ha piú della sospensione e dell'eccitazione di un giuoco difficile giuocato senza fiato, di questo cercare l'invisibile e l'occulto, in uno schema afferrato a metà, con la luce o, per così dire, l'aroma persistente, dell'oggetto che si ha in mano." (Dalla prefazione dell'autore)

Un americano di provincia viene mandato dalla ricchissima donna che vuole sposare e che é anche sua datrice di lavoro a recuperare il figliolo che suppone perduto nei vizi parigini, per riportarlo ai suoi doveri dinastici e imprenditoriali. L'ambasciatore scopre che le cose non stanno così. Non dirò cosa accade e come va a finire, ma la trama é semplice, anche se tutt'altro che banale. Dico solo che nella lettura di questo romanzo, invece non c'é proprio niente di semplice.

Il fatto é che dietro la trama Henry James nasconde "un giuoco" che davvero é complicato fino all'esasperazione (a leggere si suda, altroché). Intanto, scrive un romanzo introspettivo in terza persona, che é una cosa di una abilità tecnica mostruosa. Questo ha tra i risvolti il fatto che la scena ce la fa vedere come un gioco di ombre su un lenzuolo. Sul lenzuolo vedi le vicende che si svolgono nel mondo reale, nei salotti, nei giardini, nei boulevards di Parigi. Al narratore però interessa "l'invisibile e l'occulto", appunto. Del personaggio e di quel che fa lui vuol illuminare il lato nascosto, le intenzioni, le esitazioni, i cambi di rotta, le coerenze profonde, le debolezze. Ecco, tutto questo ci viene raccontato con un dettaglio ed un rigore notarili.

E l'aspetto più straordinario del romanzo sta nel fatto che per arrivare a questo livello di dettaglio, a questo rigore notarile, trattandosi come si é detto di in un romanzo di introspezione scritto in terza persona, occorre un ingrediente senza il quale il gioco non poteva riuscire, che é l'immaginazione. Solo l'immaginazione di un dio-burattinaio può giocare quel giuoco lì. E solo attraverso l'immaginazione si può svelare il reale che si nasconde dietro il lenzuolo delle apparenze.
È questo il privilegio del narratore e di riflesso del lettore di cui parla HJ. Non poca cosa direi.
Si suderà anche, ma bisognerà pur meritarselo!

One thing that I really appreciated about The Ambassadors, and that I feel sets it apart from many of James’ other works, is that it is written with a deep, pervasive sense of empathy, and that it positively bristles with the excitement of exploration and of mental expansion. In many ways the themes and plot of this novel are typical of James’ oeuvre as a whole, but the overall tone James maintains in The Ambassadors is vastly different, for instance, from his better-known The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove. In all three novels, James explores the striking cultural differences between the United States and Europe, examining what emerges when newly-monied but comparatively coarse, wide-eyed Americans come into contact with the impecunious but devastatingly sophisticated, world-weary human remnants of the European aristocracy. Superficially, The Ambassadors looks in many ways as if it fits the pattern of the prototypical James plot: we see a naive, sheltered American being introduced to all of the charms of European society for the first time—the glittering cosmopolitan soirees filled with charming people and witty conversation, the lofty titles that seem to attach so lightly to a name and yet imbue it with all of the rich savor and nobility of days long past, the intricately woven web of relationships, strung together with secrets and subterfuge. It is as if these American characters, who have lived their entire lives under a bare artificial bulb emitting a stark white light, have suddenly entered into the soul-awakening warmth and golden radiance of the sun itself. Can we blame them if they are temporarily blinded by its incandescent glory?

It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.

But where The Ambassadors diverges greatly from many of James’ other works is in how our protagonist’s emergence into the luminous European sunlight is depicted. In many of James’ novels, Europe is presented as brilliantly beautiful and seductive, yes, but with a radiance that is clouded over by a subtle and pervasive sense of dread. The reader feels haunted by the vague specter of threats lurking around every corner—as if they have been plunged into a magnificently grand, golden palace where traps are hidden underneath each sumptuous velvet curtain and monsters lie in wait behind each rich mahogany door. Strether’s entrance onto the European stage in The Ambassadors, however, doesn’t feel like the entrance of an innocent, unwitting victim into a deceptively elegant house of horrors. It’s more like a willing guest eagerly wandering into the most sophisticated funhouse imaginable—ready to have his center of gravity jostled as the marble floor shifts under his feet, to be amusingly perplexed at the sparkling, ever-spinning disk of dazzlingly clever conversation, to chuckle at the view of himself distorted in the gleaming, gilded hall of mirrors. The razor sharp fangs of Europe that are presented in other James novels, always ready to tear brutally into young flesh and deal the killing bite, are reduced in The Ambassadors to the tiny teeth of a troublesome puppy—its playful unprovoked nips the source of more enlivening laughter than tears, more delight than despair.

“It will be an impression that—whatever else you take—you can carry home with you, where you’ll find again so much to compare it with.”

There is something about The Ambassadors that, though the protagonist may be in his fifties, with more of his years behind him than ahead of him, reads something like a coming of age novel. Typically one expects tales following older protagonists to be sombre and slow, with the rich savor of red wine or the quiet glory of a late autumn day, in which the flaming reds and shocking yellows of early fall have begun to fade to muted burgundies and burnt oranges. The Ambassadors, however, has all of the freshness of youth. It captures the exhilaration of new impressions—vibrant, shimmering, splendid figures and forms hitherto unimagined—being left on a previously empty piece of canvas, a canvas once dappled with smudges of beige and grey, but kaleidoscopically colorful, wildly aglow with bold hues by the end of the novel. Strether may be too old for the story to truly be a “coming of age” narrative, but his soul is as open to and as hungry for new experience as any young man’s could ever be. He soaks up every new sensation offered to his palette for delectation—stops at street corners to revel in the almost religious ecstasy to be found in London architecture, savors the earthy taste (made even more delicious by the sense of its being forbidden) of the first cigarette of his life, lets himself be swept away into a hazy bliss by the petal-like softness and delicately sweet scent of the pink candles burning on his dinner table.

He wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth.

And he is equally as desirous of coming into contact with the baffling and beautiful diversity of the human world. He approaches each new specimen of the human race with the open-minded earnestness of a child and the careful curiosity of an anthropologist. Each time he meets someone new, he desperately tries to catalogue all of the miraculous details that characterize them, to take in and store away for safekeeping all of the distinctive minutiae of gait or speech or gaze that make each person who they are. Every interaction is an opportunity to add to his burgeoning mental landscape of the social world, a province once impoverished and monotonously uniform, but becoming more populous and more varied with each passing day. Strether’s age has not dulled the warmth and the radiance of his spirit, and the years haven’t calcified around him, enclosing him in an insular shell of cynicism or rigid routine. He is as open as any human could ever be to the splendor of the world in all of its utterly unpredictable, endlessly variform glory.

Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this grey interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography.

And yet there is an ever-present undertow of sadness to the world opening itself up to Strether at last—because perhaps it is revealing all of its wonders to him too late. Vibrant and hungry for experience as Strether may be, the inescapable fact is that he is no longer young. Even as his soul miraculously preserved the tender bloom of youth, his body marched dutifully on through the years, accumulating wear and tear as it went along. Many of Strether’s choices were irrevocably made long ago, and the better part of his life already been spent in a veritable wasteland of arbitrary rules and soul-deadening conventionality, never to return. There is something brutally tragic in Strether finally experiencing everything the world has to offer—glimpsing the exquisite beauty of art and architecture and nature, plunging for the first time deep into the cool crystal waters of the intellect, feeling the invigorating spark and the comforting warmth of genuine connection with another human being—only to see it all slip from between his fingers. His trip to Europe gifts him with the knowledge of how rich and full life can be, but also burdens him with the overwhelming sense that such a life is not for him. Once, perhaps, but no longer. Now he can only peek at it it through the misty curtain of his years, lift up a corner of the gauzy fabric and touch it with the tips of his fingers—and then let it go.

“I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I DO see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.”

One aspect of the novel that really speaks to me, relatively minor though it may be, is the rich way in which James describes the various dwellings of his characters. In all of his works, really, but perhaps never quite so much powerfully as in The Ambassadors, James demonstrates a profound gift for capturing what I’d call the poetry of possessions and places. He seems to view the homes in which people live, and all of the little objects they fill them with—the precious, tarnished trinkets and tokens they have gathered and cherished over the years—as extensions of their owners’ very spirits. The rooms we ensconce ourselves in and the objects we chose to surround ourselves with, the ones we see every morning upon rising and every night before we go to sleep, the ones that make up the background of our lives for years upon years, aren’t just inanimate things and inert places. They have lives of their own, and even, one feels at times, independent wills. The composition of a room can influence the tenor of an interaction, can determine our mood, can shape our actions. A grand office, filled with stately, heavy wooden furniture so solid that its presence feels almost importunate, nay, dreadfully imposing, seems to forbid casual conversation, to proudly pronounce that only formal language is to be used, only lofty topics discussed in such noble surroundings. The glimmering, grand chandelier of a ballroom turns our eyes into miniature glassy mirrors, sparkling with reflected droplets of crystalline light that dart and dance, and makes our hearts flutter madly in anticipation of the magical evening ahead of us. The book-filled shelves of a musty old library, row after row of worn leather spines embossed with fading gilded titles, seem to beg us to run our fingers along their crinkle-edged pages, to listen to the gentle whisper of skin against parchment.

And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed.

The way in which we fit up and fill our domiciles, James suggests, has the potential not just to influence our feelings and behavior, but to say something profound about who we are as people. The homes in which James characters reside aren’t just ornamental backgrounds, lifeless settings in which the human drama of the narrative happens to unfold. These dwellings tell us something—often something subtle but crucial—about the people who live there. The apartments of expatriates, brimming with beautiful assemblages of exquisite, enigmatic objects—objects that were clearly chosen with delicate care, the result of hours spent scouring markets and rifling through the overflowing shelves of odd, out-of-the-way shops—reflect the nature of their characters, which become, after years spent abroad, amalgamations of foreign mannerisms and traditions, intentionally selected, adopted, and cherished. Their possessions and their personas become carefully curated collections, attempts at surrounding themselves with the finest Parisian antiques and imbibing the most refined standards of behavior that Europe has to offer. The residences of French aristocrats, on the other hand, are equally as beautiful, and have a consonance, a uniformity of tone, and an ease that the lovingly and painstakingly crafted apartments of the expatriates lack. The priceless heirlooms with which the aristocrats’ homes are filled create a scene that is faultless, natural. The possessions haven’t been chosen by hand, assembled from charming oddities picked up here and there, but rather passed from generation to generation as a seamless, composed whole. These inherited objects operate in perfect concert with one another—they are a magnificent symphony made solid, in which not a single note is out of harmony with the rest. They are, like the manners of their impressive owners, absolutely impeccable. Seams, even well-disguised ones, will ultimately show—but the domiciles and the characters of these aristocrats are faultless. They have the perfection of setting and of bearing that only comes with blood itself—the type of ease and consistency that can only be achieved and distilled into their finest forms after generations and generations of practice. Suffice it to say, it is worth paying attention to the homes in James’ novels—they murmur the secrets of their residents quietly but insistently, speak to us of their owners in soft voices as muted but as constant as the hushed sound of waves heard from a distance.

The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he had been shown.

n  Modern Library 100 Best Novelsn (27/100)

" 'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’ ”—she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.”
“Oh I know that!” said Strether.
“But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”
“I know that too,” Strether smiled.

---

n  Some spoilers below:n For some reason I felt the need to talk about the ending of the book, so I'm literally telling you how this novel ends in order for me to express my thoughts afterwards. Feel free to read that part of my review—the penultimate paragraph—regardless, and thank you for understanding.

I'm quite sure we don't find books that change our life every single day—probably that would be insane—but when it happens, you already know that that book will be with you forever, that you won't be the same person you were before reading it. It is a big change, it is a whole thing for you to think of, as if you were about to start like a new chapter in your life. Well, I guess The Ambassadors is that book for me.

I remember when I started my Jamesian journey back in 2020, and now here we are, having finished the final 'trilogy' by one of my all-time favorite writers: The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and of course, The Ambassadors. Trilogy perhaps is not the right way to call them, since every book has its own independent storyline and therefore that story has nothing to do with the other two, but when it comes to James and his last works, I think it is rather useful to identify those that are very similar in terms of the prose and the topics, just like these three books are in particular, and to remember that a slow reading should be the best way for you to really enjoy them.
The Ambassadors is not an easy read, even I would say it was the most confusing, ambiguous, complex and not-to-the-point novel by James I have read so far—along with The Golden Bowl—yet it was so profound and beautifully written that I almost felt as if the author were having a real conversation with me while I read it. Since I'm used to reading his novels and his style of writing, it was not as challenging as some of my previous reading experiences such as The Golden Bowl or The Beast in the Jungle, however, I would never recommend this novel to anyone, not even to someone who enjoyed reading his previous works.

This novel introduces one of the most interesting Jamesian characters I have found thus far: Lambert Strether, a widower who is arriving in Europe from the States, has the purpose to rescue his son in-law Chad who is living a new, probably crazy life in Paris, and bring him back home, since Mrs. Newsome, Strether’s future wife, has asked him to do so. That's the storyline, by the way, a few lines and I have said what this book is entirely about. Perhaps, at the end of the day, this novel is not impressive because of the plot, but because of the way it is written; I know, ambiguity is always a main characteristic of any James' books, and The Ambassadors is not an exception. The more you read the book, the more you want to put it aside, which is a normal scenario (it might happen to everyone, in my view), but, on the other hand, if you are really into it, if the book is telling you something quite meaningful, remarkable, let's say, showing you a new perspective of life—just as my experience was—in the end you'll be able to love it, that's for sure.

Strether's life before meeting Chad in Paris used to be simple, perhaps a little monotonous, and at one moment way back when he was younger, really sad and heartbreaking, but after that meeting, he started to feel young again, somehow he managed to be free, so to speak. 'Free? Free from what?' You might ask; well, basically now he is free from himself, free from anything which hindered his own life to success. As we know, it is a whole process to realize where you are in life at one precise moment, if you are heading in the right direction or perhaps losing your way—which is, in my experience, a good thing sometimes—and what you want to do about it. Therefore, Strether's story taught me two very important things: firstly, it's never too late to start living and enjoying your own life, maybe a new life, and secondly, that I don't want to wait one more minute to keep living mine. I am 26—almost 27 in a few days, holy cow!—and Strether is twice my age, but I know nevertheless I have lived many things that have shaped the person who I am right now, and I also know people are always learning new stuff, that people are always living new experiences that make them question 'who am I?,' 'who do I want to become?,' 'where will I be, let's say, in 10, 20, 30 years?,' and so on and so forth, but here is the thing, if I dreaded something while reading this book was the fact that I don't want to turn Strether's age and to say 'I don't even know who I am'. Better late than never, so people say, but what if you start working on it now, not tomorrow, but today?
Perhaps the way Strether's story somehow changed me as a person, at this stage of my life, is unexpected and even inexplicable to me, yet quite remarkable, and eventually I prefer to figure it out on my own – I do remember there were many thoughts in my head while I was reading the novel, which, as I said, is not something that happened to me before, or at least not in the same way, not at the same level either. Never—perhaps I'm too dramatic saying this in this way—never before had a book made me feel what The Ambassadors made me feel when I read it, and yet I can't even explain how such a thing had an impact on me, this connection, this feeling... sorry but I can't (and if I could, I would rather keep it a secret than share it with everyone).

The ending of the novel was really vague and something that only Henry James could have written: Strether coming back home and not staying in Paris – why is he coming back?! What does it mean? When I read that part I got confused and I started overthinking the whole scene, perhaps trying to make out what the author wanted to say here. After a few days, I went back, I read the last two chapters again, and perhaps this time I got a conclusion (needless to say it is my conclusion but probably not the most accurate): Strether is coming back Massachusetts, not because he didn't learn anything during his visit to Chad in Paris, but because he wanted to live his new life in the place where he grew up, the place where everything began, so to speak, although this time as a new man and with a different attitude; that person is not the same Strether who arrived in London in the first chapter, but a completely different Strether, a much better version of himself, in my opinion (if this is not a coming-of-age novel, then I don't know what is).

Finally, I'd like to finish my 'review' by saying The Ambassadors is a novel which you have to read not only once in your life, but as many times as possible—as long as you enjoyed your first reading experience—and that's what I'm planning to do in the distant future – I can almost tell that picking it up again will have to be hugely rewarding. Here, for instance, I'm sharing only one of my favorite quotes with you, and probably the most important lines for me when reading the novel a couple of weeks ago:
“Of course I’m youth—youth for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what has been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad ‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It’s a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don’t know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel. I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and she does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they’re young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the freshest way, their own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if they were to fail me.”