Product Description

Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. At its centre are two aristocrats, former lovers, who embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While the Marquise de Merteuil challenges the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce an innocent convent girl, the Vicomte is also occupied with the conquest of a virtuous married woman. But as their intrigues become more duplicitous and they find their human pawns responding in ways they could not have predicted, the consequences prove to be more serious, and deadly, than Merteuil and Valmont could have guessed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37643 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-22
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

About the Author
Choderlos de Laclos was born in 1741, at Amiens. He entered the army at the age of 18 and reached the rank of capitaine-commandant without seeing battle. In 1779 he was sent to the island of Aix, where Dangeruous Liaisons was written. Helen Constantine has translated Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin for Penguin Classics which will be published in 2004 with an introduction by Patricia Duncker. And with David Constantine, she has translated a volume of Henri Michaux's poetry, Spaced and Displaced (Bloodaxe). She lives in Oxford.

Customer Reviews

An Immoral Tale
Penguin here give us a new translation of Dangerous Liasions that is very good. M Laclos apparently said that he wanted to write a book that would stand out and cause a stir after he was dead. I suspect that he didn't expect people to be avidly reading it over 200 years later and still enjoying it.

What Laclos gives us is a story in the epistolary form of what happens when people are rich and titled and have become bored, looking for new ways to entertain themsleves; much as the Marquis de Sade wrote about. Two people a man and a woman, go about taking people's virginity, causing a stir and scandal amongst others, in an attempt to outdo each other. Of course things don't always run smoothly between these two people, with disastrous results.

Although this book was written in the eighteenth century it still carries a resonance in todays world. There are people out there who take advantage of others and play games like those in this book, with no idea or care of the trouble they cause, and that is why this book has remained so popular. Laclos did more than write a book of his times but did something special, he wrote a book for all times.

Be warned this book will shock you and make you laugh, due to its darkly black humour, but you will not be able to stop yourself from reading it cover to cover, and re-reading it again and again. This a definite must have for any bookcase.

A Study of Nastiness
I first read "Dangerous Liaisons" as a set text for an Open University course. "Oh dear! France in the 18th. century. Ah well - needs must!" After the first 2 or 3 letters - wow! Read it on the Underground going to work. Read it in coffee break. Read it when I should have been working. Read it in bed. What a wonderful account of two dissolute, amoral, exploitive, over-privileged, self-regarding French aristos, devoting their idle, pointless lives to the destruction of others' reputations. They even exploit and involve their own servants in their pathetic schemes. You find yourself hoping that the Marquise and the Viconte ended up "looking out of the Republican window" when the French Revolution rounded up their ilk. The writing style is inevitably ornate by modern standards, with some sentences the length of Guardian leader columns - but you get used to it. I think that in this edition, the translator has attempted to render some of the 18th. century French idiom into its modern English equivalent. Hey - there's maybe an Open University Ph.D degree in that!
An afterthought - surely the book is way, way better than any film that could be made of it?

Excellent
Excellent performance. It really gets you hooked. The music intermezzos are well chosen and add to the building of the climax of the story.