a nasty & cynical but also sparklingly funny comedy of manners & sex
February 11, 2023 2:48 PM Subscribe
Even so: Read the book. “Timeless and timely” is a cliché, but sometimes it happens to be true. Feminist debates aside, the novel’s conflicts between solipsism and human connection, sexual agency and the need for love, echo and anticipate today’s conversations about sexual freedom; its world of endless socializing and fear of social “ruin” evokes today’s social media and “cancel culture”; and its rarely equaled ability to create characters who are “problematic” yet riveting, hateful and sympathetic, goes to the heart of the modern war over art and morality. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which triumphantly survived more than a century of censorship and suppression, tells us that in this war, the right side of history is the one where great art is. from Love and Libertinism: The Endless Fascination of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’
A fairly new acquaintance of mine gave me a copy of LLD, the signet paperback English translation by I don’t remember who, and I read a few of the letters at random and decided it would be hard for me to finish unless there were characters I liked a lot better than the ones whose letters I read.
About a week later he and I were sitting at a 4 person table in a coffee house right across the street from the campus of the university where he was a graduate student in English Lit. A woman he knew and had during a previous conversation with me expressed keen interest in dating sat down with coffee and an almond croissant next to him and across from me.
Without much of a preamble, he proceeded to tell her that he had heard rumors that a man I knew she was interested in (because I’d seen the two of them in laughing and animated conversation several times) had herpes and had given it to a couple of other women.
I was stunned, but since he had chosen to include me in this conversation, I thought I had license to say I believed it was extremely irresponsible to say a thing like that about someone without evidence to back it up, and then I turned to her and said 'and not only that, he was telling me just last week how he was dying to date you, and i think you have a right to know that before you decide how seriously to take this'.
He was bright red and stammering at that point, and she got up and stormed out the door leaving most of her coffee and a half eaten croissant on the table. He and I then had a fairly sharp exchange which wasn’t quite a shouting match but must have transfixed half the house, and then he got up and stormed out. I bussed the table and sat back down to finish my coffee, but no one else chose to join me for some reason.
All this to say that, for God's sake, do not mistake Les Liaisons Dangereuses for an instruction manual on dating and love affairs!
posted by jamjam at 5:55 PM on February 11, 2023 [37 favorites]
About a week later he and I were sitting at a 4 person table in a coffee house right across the street from the campus of the university where he was a graduate student in English Lit. A woman he knew and had during a previous conversation with me expressed keen interest in dating sat down with coffee and an almond croissant next to him and across from me.
Without much of a preamble, he proceeded to tell her that he had heard rumors that a man I knew she was interested in (because I’d seen the two of them in laughing and animated conversation several times) had herpes and had given it to a couple of other women.
I was stunned, but since he had chosen to include me in this conversation, I thought I had license to say I believed it was extremely irresponsible to say a thing like that about someone without evidence to back it up, and then I turned to her and said 'and not only that, he was telling me just last week how he was dying to date you, and i think you have a right to know that before you decide how seriously to take this'.
He was bright red and stammering at that point, and she got up and stormed out the door leaving most of her coffee and a half eaten croissant on the table. He and I then had a fairly sharp exchange which wasn’t quite a shouting match but must have transfixed half the house, and then he got up and stormed out. I bussed the table and sat back down to finish my coffee, but no one else chose to join me for some reason.
All this to say that, for God's sake, do not mistake Les Liaisons Dangereuses for an instruction manual on dating and love affairs!
posted by jamjam at 5:55 PM on February 11, 2023 [37 favorites]
I read Dangerous Liaisons when I was fairly young (high school or early college? after seeing the movie) and it blew my mind to think that people could think about sexual relationships in the way. It would be interesting to read it again now.
posted by medusa at 7:37 PM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by medusa at 7:37 PM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Alan Rickman played Valmont in 1987 on Broadway. (I read someplace many years ago that Jonathan Frakes saw him in it and recommended him for the part of Hans Grueber.)
Colin Firth played Valmont in "Valmont" a year later than the Glenn Close movie.
They are two of my favorite actors. I so wish there was a recording of Rickman's whole performance so I could see it. BTW if you liked Firth in Pride and Prejudice, he's all that and more in Valmont.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 9:38 PM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Colin Firth played Valmont in "Valmont" a year later than the Glenn Close movie.
They are two of my favorite actors. I so wish there was a recording of Rickman's whole performance so I could see it. BTW if you liked Firth in Pride and Prejudice, he's all that and more in Valmont.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 9:38 PM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
kyrademon: while we know very little about the author in many respects
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is an immensely fascinating guy. Besides having written Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he was an avowed feminist, an artillery officer in the French Republican army, fought at Valmy, invented the modern explosive artillery shell (!) and died in a fort he designed himself in the Mediterranean.
The guy deserves a prestige TV series, let alone a major English-language biography.
posted by Kattullus at 1:42 AM on February 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is an immensely fascinating guy. Besides having written Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he was an avowed feminist, an artillery officer in the French Republican army, fought at Valmy, invented the modern explosive artillery shell (!) and died in a fort he designed himself in the Mediterranean.
The guy deserves a prestige TV series, let alone a major English-language biography.
posted by Kattullus at 1:42 AM on February 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
By the by, just because I realize it sounds so ludicrous, here’s an actual scholar on Laclos’ invention of the explosive artillery shell:
posted by Kattullus at 3:41 AM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Berthollet had all along had in mind substituting muriate powder for conventional gunpowder in propellent charges, not in the explosive charges carried in shells, bombs, and grenades. Laclos was the one who imagined the latter application. As soon as he learned of the existence of muriate powder, he regarded it as an improvement upon his own favorite project, which, as we have seen, had long been the development of explosive ammunition, "boulets creux" hollow cannonballs filled with gunpowder, to be employed in cannons both on land and sea as well as in mortars and howitzers.From Charles Coulston Gillespie’s “Science and Secret Weapons Development in Revolutionary France, 1792-1804: A Documentary History” (JSTOR link, page 105).
posted by Kattullus at 3:41 AM on February 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Then he wrote Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And nothing else.
He wrote one novel, but plenty of other stuff as well.
The guy deserves a prestige TV series, let alone a major English-language biography.
Quite. Or at least a translation of the 2013 biography, Choderlos de Laclos l'auteur des Liaisons dangereuses. Anglophone publishers (presumably reflecting anglophone readers) seem to have a limited appetite for French history. Can't glut the market for Tudors, but once you cross the channel....
For now, here's a nice little write up about him and his wife.
(His eldest son went to Saint-Cyr, died in 1814 fighting against Cossacks. The son's notebooks are public domain.)
posted by BWA at 7:00 AM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
He wrote one novel, but plenty of other stuff as well.
The guy deserves a prestige TV series, let alone a major English-language biography.
Quite. Or at least a translation of the 2013 biography, Choderlos de Laclos l'auteur des Liaisons dangereuses. Anglophone publishers (presumably reflecting anglophone readers) seem to have a limited appetite for French history. Can't glut the market for Tudors, but once you cross the channel....
For now, here's a nice little write up about him and his wife.
(His eldest son went to Saint-Cyr, died in 1814 fighting against Cossacks. The son's notebooks are public domain.)
posted by BWA at 7:00 AM on February 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
I just read LLD and found it amazing and, yes, feminist. It was an interesting contrast, reading it just after Proust. Proust seems to want to make the human experience into a novel, and succeeds, with sincere and extremely fine observations of human behaviour. LLD seems to be about deceit, but it is full of strikingly deep and accurate observations on social roles of men and women. Also, in French, the language is magnificent. Now to read the linked article...
posted by anzen-dai-ichi at 5:07 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by anzen-dai-ichi at 5:07 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
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One minor bit of information I've always found fascinating is that, while we know very little about the author in many respects, we do have a letter he wrote where he essentially says, "You know what? I think I'll write exactly one great classic of world literature, and then nothing else." Then he wrote Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And nothing else.
posted by kyrademon at 3:42 PM on February 11, 2023 [7 favorites]