Recommendations
Books Like The Red and the Black
Best books to read after The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Stendhal's The Red and the Black is one of the earliest and most psychologically acute novels in any language — the story of Julien Sorel's ambition, hypocrisy, and ultimate self-destruction in Restoration France. These recommendations extend the experience through Stendhal's other work and through the French psychological novel that inherits his innovations.
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The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
Stendhal's 1839 second great novel — Fabrice del Dongo's picaresque adventures in Italy, from Waterloo to a Parma prison — is lighter in tone than The Red and the Black but equally sophisticated in its psychology. Balzac called it the greatest novel of the century in a famous review.
- 2Buy
Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's 1835 novel about Rastignac's social ambitions in Paris is the direct contemporary rival to The Red and the Black — both novels are about ambition in Restoration France, and Balzac's social comprehensiveness complements Stendhal's psychological precision.
- 3Buy
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The next great French novel in the tradition that Stendhal established — Emma Bovary's self-delusion is the domestic, female counterpart to Julien Sorel's social self-fashioning. Both characters are destroyed by the gap between their imaginative life and the reality available to them.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky explicitly acknowledged Stendhal's influence — Myshkin's position in Russian society is partly a response to Julien Sorel's. Where Julien uses calculation to navigate society, Myshkin's total inability to calculate makes the contrast that defines the range of possible responses to a corrupt world.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's Isabel Archer — an American woman who believes in her own autonomy and is systematically deceived by people who want to use her — is the Anglophone psychological novel's answer to Stendhal's Julien: a character whose self-knowledge and capacity for experience exceed what the social world will allow.
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Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's 1869 novel about Frédéric Moreau's Parisian failure is the anti-Julien — where Julien acts, Frédéric drifts; where Julien's ambition is too hot, Frédéric's is too lukewarm. Reading them together defines the range of nineteenth-century French responses to ambition.
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov's theory of extraordinary men — that exceptional individuals are above ordinary moral constraint — is a Russian development of the Stendhalian hero's self-fashioning. Both novels are about intelligent, ambitious young men who theorize themselves into disaster.
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's Stevens is the anti-Julien — where Julien performs emotions he doesn't feel in pursuit of ambition, Stevens suppresses emotions he does feel in pursuit of professional dignity. Both novels are organized around the gap between self-presentation and actual inner life.
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