This is a very well-regarded psychological novel set during the Bourbon Restoration about an ambitious, well-educated, but low-bred young man and his attempts to improve his station in life.

I don't know. The popular consensus seems to be that Stendhal intended this to be a satire of the type of people French society propped up back then. Fair enough -- the bourgeois of his hometown, Verrières, are all tasteless money grubbers who communicate exclusively through gossip, the clergy of the seminary he ends up joining for a bit are at the lower level sheep who can't think for themselves and at the higher level constantly fighting each other over petty ideological differences, and the nobility are effete conformists who despite their power are afraid of the consequences of differentiating themselves from their peers.

But the protagonist (idolises Napoleon, aspires to a similar glory) is equally ret@rded; he hates everyone, sure, but they're holding him back less than his own ressentiment, which leads him to do so many escalatingly stupid things that one of them inevitably causes his downfall. Are we the reader meant to lament that he was simply born in the wrong generation at a time when there could be no great heroes? Or laugh/cry at his inability to school his impulses and keep playing the game when he had one foot on the winner's podium? Maybe it is intended as a humbling towards people who fancy themselves something special and above the human excesses of feeling. Or maybe the curtains are just blue because that was the only colour they had at IKEA. Interested to hear your thoughts on this if you have read the book.

Otherwise I understand why people like this so much -- it's fresh and certainly quite a bit ahead of its time, the protagonist is compellingly Machiavellian, and the whole thing is like a slow-motion car crash you can't stop watching. I'm sure some of the political stuff flew over my head no matter how much I tried to Google but it (or at least, the Moncrieff translation of it) was still worth reading. I didn't particularly enjoy it though.