Recommendations
Books Like The Red and the Black
Best books to read after The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Red and the Black is the foundational novel of ambition — Julien Sorel's attempt to rise through post-Napoleonic French society through intelligence, calculation, and the seduction of women above his class. If the novel's psychological precision and its portrait of a man who must perform feelings he cannot always distinguish from real ones moved you, these books share its concern with the energy of ambition, its interest in the gap between interior life and social performance, and its conviction that the desire to rise is both the most compelling and the most dangerous human impulse.
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The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
The essential companion — Fabrizio del Dongo in Napoleonic Italy; written in 52 days and covering the same themes of ambition, love, and political intrigue from an aristocratic rather than plebeian perspective; the contrast between Julien's calculating rise and Fabrizio's impulsive adventures shows the full range of Stendhal's genius
- 2Buy
Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
The essential French companion — Rastignac's arrival in Paris and his decision to pursue wealth and position by any means necessary; the 'I'll take you on!' that closes Père Goriot is the direct descendant of Julien Sorel's ambition, and Balzac and Stendhal between them define the great French tradition of the provincial young man conquering Paris
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
The essential English parallel — Pip's desire to become a gentleman and his gradual discovery of what that desire costs; where Julien rises by calculation and seduction, Pip rises by a mysterious benefactor, but both are organized around the question of whether ambition corrupts the person who feels it
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The essential German predecessor — Werther's suffering as a young man of sensibility in a world that has no place for his feeling; The Red and the Black is in many ways Stendhal's response to Werther: what happens when the sensitive young man adds calculation to feeling and tries to win rather than simply suffer
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Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's most ambitious novel — Lucien de Rubempré's attempt to make his literary fortune in Paris; where Julien chooses the priesthood as his vehicle, Lucien chooses journalism; both are organized around the corrupting power of the ambition to rise and the institutions that simultaneously offer and foreclose that possibility
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
The essential English satirical parallel — Becky Sharp's ruthless ascent through English society using intelligence, charm, and the exploitation of the men who pursue her; Becky is the female Julien, operating with the same calculation but in a social world where women's only ascent is through marriage rather than the church or army
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The Ambassadors
by Henry James
James's novel about Lambert Strether's education in Paris — the American parallel in which the intelligence and precision of observation that Stendhal applies to ambition is applied instead to the perception of what one has missed; reading The Red and the Black alongside The Ambassadors gives both poles of what attention to inner life can do
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Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's existentialist novel — the most important French philosophical novel of the century after Stendhal; where The Red and the Black is organized around the energy of ambition, Nausea is organized around the paralysis of absolute freedom; together they define the range of what French fiction does with consciousness
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