Manon Lescaut

By: Antoine-Francois Prevost d'Exiles

Narrated by: Walter Covell

Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Manon is just about to enter a convent when she meets the young Chevalier des Grieux, a philosophy student. They flee to Paris together, where they live extravagantly off the money the Chevalier makes cheating at cards, until they are robbed of their possessions. Manon becomes mistress to a wealthy nobleman, and she and the Chevalier steal his money. They are captured and sent to a penal colony in Louisiana.

Author Antoine-Françoise Prévost d'Exiles, a Jesuit novice turned soldier turned priest, led nearly as exciting a life as his swashbuckling heroes.

(P) JimCin Recordings

Classics are great and worth a listen

I enjoyed this story very much, the music from the opera is fantastic. I found this story very engaging and worth the time. It is not a long book and should be a quick listen. I licked the classic nature of the tragedy of the story. It reminded me of other Puccini operas and of some classic Shakespeare's plot lines.

Classic Romantic Picaresque Novella

I was lured to the idea of reading this little romantic page-turner from a (formerly via Great Courses) audio course on Literature by Leo Damrosch entitled "The Rise of the Novel". Incidentally, that course is now on Audible also. It captivated me for the first 3.5 out of the total 5.5 hours and the remainder would have been much more passable if I'd only had some decent red wine to sip or maybe some brandy or scotch to consume it with. There is a quality to it that reminds me of reading A Rebors (or as it's been titles in English, "Against the Grain"), by a similar Jesuit Abbe/priest of similar prodical misadventures, Joris-Karl Huysmans.

This particular Jesuit confessional by Prevost is similarly able to keep the attention as an interesting and at times positively spell-binding yarn, and it sparingly informs us, as all good novels do, as to the atmosphere, customs and mores of the time and place where the action is happening. That said, be warned that this is a tragic tale all in all, and though it ends well for one lover in some ways, it does not end well for the (later, singular) title character. It also lacks the splendor of a Don Quixote with all its humorous episodes, songs, poems and magical interludes, though it does justice to the sentiments of a Cervantes with the adroit little aphoristic quotes that presage each chapter, as was good form up till that time to do. The story, as a confessional, has something of the epistolary novel to it, though we're not given that pretense of it being written in the form of letters to an acquaintance, but rather as a straightforward narration. Otherwise, it would not be as brief as 5+ hrs via audiobook.

In his chapter on Manon Lescaut, Damrosch explains how the story of the lovers in Manon Lescaut was a touchstone in the course of western story-telling due to the intriguing nature of the story and the lively way the story is told, Enlightenment mannerisms, formalities and all such as they inevitably are in such a story written during the Enlightenment's fading. And despite what might seem a rather nasal and over-assuming diction on the part of the narrator, with noticeably uneven qualities at various points. I think the reader must have caught the flu at some point or the tape underwent perhaps some magnetic anomaly. Nonetheless he does good service to the voice of the narrator in this rare audiobook of the English translation. His storytelling also managed great brevity in what could easily have been a much-extended story -- so much so that one suspects a healing purpose of the Abbe's having written such a thing out with such quick fervor...


About the story's history
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Originally written in 1731 under the title, Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut, by the Abbé Prévost, a high-ranking Jesuit Priest with some adventures of his own under his belt in his time, this brief little novella exemplifies the picaresque mode that was breaking through the Enlightenment and which took its cues from such earlier examples as Don Quixote and to some extent the bawdy ancient Roman novel, the Golden Ass. It would be for another century before the likes of Puccini would memorialize the tale.

At the time of its reeling landmark 1731 publication, this wayward tale of petty nobility engaged in a harrowing and unchristened romantic love affair in the face of all odds truly rocked the foundations of the western European society along the petty nobility and probably more so among the upper-bourgeois as a scandalous tale of romance against all odds and in the face of respectable convention, no doubt as the performing piano composers Lizt and Beethoven had begun to explore the more heart-rending and scandalous romantic themes in roughly the century or so afterward in music halls all along the Rhine, no doubt with the tale somewhere in their minds. The French, German and even the English at that time would have recalled famous Greek lovers, giving pallor to their faded marbled faces, invigorating the budding Romantic period just around the corner as its themes became more of a mainstay.

The story itself was memorialized by Puccini's opera of the much abbreviated title, "Manon Lescaut". Puccini's opera adds much visual and musical tangibility to this tale and manages to make the characters and themes eternal for the opera-goers ever afterward, but it is from a Jesuit priest's own hand that the yarn was scrivened, and it is despite its pretensions to act as an (indirect) morality tale to which many future picaresques would often allude -- hopeless romantic adventures gone awry in the name of some singular love, mission, or inarticulated need in the quenching of which would require extensive travel, sometimes humorous anecdotes and heroic (or as in this case, ostensibly anti-heroic) travail.

The list of operas, films and television adaptations and incorporations to follow Pucinini's own (including the three lesser-known auteurs before him) may stagger the minds of those who have not heard of ML and otherwise consider themselves confident aficionados of the nooks and crannies of the western literary canon:

I'd give the story itself 4 and a half stars if that were permissible, but since it's not, I'll err on the side of 5 stars.


Errors
----------------------------
There is at least one mistaken overlap of what appears to be previous earlier dialogue in the taping of the original cassette-to-digital transfer, however brief it is, mid-way through, and which will appear obvious enough. It does nothing to mar the overall enjoyment or following of the story. Generally, the voice of the reader coincides well with that of the narrator. Thus the 3 out of 5 stars in this review of the audiobook version.


Dramas, operas and ballets
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Manon Lescaut (1830), a ballet by Jean-Louis Aumer
Manon Lescaut (1856), an opera by French composer Daniel Auber
Manon (1884), an opera by French composer Jules Massenet
Manon Lescaut (1893), an opera by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini
Manon Lescaut (1940), a drama in verse by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval
Boulevard Solitude (1952) "Lyrisches Drama" (lyric drama) or opera by German composer Hans Werner Henze
Manon (first performed in 1974), a ballet with music by Jules Massenet and choreography by Kenneth MacMillan
Manon (2015), a musical written for the Takarazuka troupe by librettist/director Keiko Ueda and composer Joy Son[2]


Films
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Manon Lescaut (1926), directed by Arthur Robison, with Lya de Putti
When a Man Loves (1927), directed by Alan Crosland, with John Barrymore and Dolores Costello
Manon Lescaut (1940), directed by Carmine Gallone, with Vittorio de Sica and Alida Valli
Manon (1949), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, with Michel Auclair and Cécile Aubry
The Lovers of Manon Lescaut (1954), directed by Mario Costa
Manon 70 (1968), directed by Jean Aurel, with Catherine Deneuve and Sami Frey
Manón (1986), Venezuelan movie directed by Román Chalbaud, with Mayra Alejandra
Manon Lescaut (2013), directed by Gabriel Aghion, with Céline Perreau and Samuel Theis

Total Translations Performed to Date
----------------------------
English translations of the original 1731 version of the novel include Helen Waddell's (1931). For the 1753 revision, there are translations by, among others, L. W. Tancock (Penguin, 1949—though he divides the 2-part novel into a number of chapters), Donald M. Frame (Signet, 1961—which notes differences between the 1731 and 1753 editions), Angela Scholar (Oxford, 2004, with extensive notes and commentary), and Andrew Brown (Hesperus, 2004, with a foreword by Germaine Greer).

Henri Valienne (1854–1908), a physician and author of the first novel in the constructed language Esperanto, translated Manon Lescaut into that language. His translation was published at Paris in 1908, and reissued by the British Esperanto Association in 1926.

Other Uses
----------------------------
Dorothy L. Sayers used the novel's plot for her 1926 novel, Clouds of Witness, which was filmed and became episode 1 of the Lord Peter Wimsey (TV series) television series.


* Ending credits borrowed from Wikipedia's diligent, if pedantic, bean-counting scholars in hiding.