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  • The Study of Manipulation

  • This novel, which was written before the French Revolution, is told solely through the character's correspondances with one another. Some letters are less than enlightening (I found Presidente de Tourvel's and Valmont's bantering quite annoying), but these are minor glitches in a fabulous work that ... Continue

    This novel, which was written before the French Revolution, is told solely through the character's correspondances with one another. Some letters are less than enlightening (I found Presidente de Tourvel's and Valmont's bantering quite annoying), but these are minor glitches in a fabulous work that exposes the French aristocratic lifestyle.

    The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil are two of the best villains ever created! They're heartless and destructive, yet everyone believes them sincere. They trap the naive in finely spun webs for mere entertainment. They are partners in crime, describing their plots and sexual conquests in detail. It becomes a competition of who can achieve more. De Laclos provides a brilliant study on human apathy that will leave you shaking your head in disgust.

    

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• ― MoirneStark said on Jul 10, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Its prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil--gifted, wealth, and bored--form an unholy alliance and
turn seduction into a game. And they play this game with such wit and style that it is impossible not to admire them, until they discover mysterious rules that they cannot understand. In the ensuing battle there can be no winners, and the innocent suffer with the guilty.
This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able to judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about a world we still inhabit.

• 800 Literatureepistolaryfrench lit16-18th century lit18Ctranslationnovelfiction