The Ambassadors

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Walter Zimmerman

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

One of the final masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest authors, Henry James’s The Ambassadors is now available for the first time in a Modern Library edition, with a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín. A keenly observed tale of a man’s awakening to life, this dark comic novel follows Lewis Lambert Strether, a middle-aged widower, on a mission to Europe to convince his fiancée’s wayward son to forsake the pleasures of Paris and return to America. Rich with fin de siècle detail, The Ambassadors brims with finely drawn character portraits, including one of the Master’s most unforgettable heroines—the beguiling Madame de Vionnet. This was the novel that Henry James himself considered his finest, and no one is better equipped to put it into literary and historical context than Colm Tóibín, whose award-winning novel The Master depicted the inner life of James in the final years of the nineteenth century.(P) JimCin Recordings

servicable recording of James's greatest book

If you're prepared for a book written in James's late style, with its labyrinthine sentence structures etc., and plan to read it as well as listen to it, this could be a useful recording to you. The reader is pretty good, but the audio quality is often poor, as it is apparently transferred from old tapes. At times it even speeds up and slows down! Still, it was helpful to me in a first reading of the book, which I enjoyed immensely. Now I understand why many including James himself consider it his best novel.

Henry James to the nth

Beautifully read, with a satisfying emotional depth and the trademark Henry James indirectness. It took me a long time to get through this book because other things distracted me, but I always returned to it for something that one just can't get out of most fiction. Probably it's worth five stars, but I think that it is beyond many readers.

Maddening

This book is almost impossible to bear because it is James at his most ridiculously contradictory and virtually everything is learned through accounts of what the hero observes rather than through direct conversation or action. The narrator mostly sounds like a robot, but if you stick with it, the whole mess grows on you. James really can write.

Those are audio stars, not plot stars.

I've read The Ambassadors several times in print. It's not an enjoyable novel. Sentences wind on forever. Character dialogue is difficult to follow and poorly attributed. The plot is slow, even glacial. I'm writing one of my dissertation chapters on this novel, and even I dread reading through it. So, if you're just looking for something fun to read, steer clear of this work. Instead, try one of James's earlier novels. Or, Eliot. Or Trollope. You get the idea.

BUT if for some horrible reason you have no choice and you MUST read this book, then stick with the audio. The narrator adds breaks and emphasis where there are none in the book, and this makes the reading experience almost tolerable. So, in summary: listening is better than reading, but simply avoiding the novel is your best bet by far.

The ambassadors

enjoyed it very much. It is a great story and the reading is well done.