Those "happy few" that have read Stendhal's other famous works (The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, etc.) and know the quality of his writing will probably already recognize what a shame it is that this unfinished work is long out of print. Don't be fooled by the fact that it is unfinished. As in Kafka, the incomplete nature of the novel is an outgrowth of the book's philosophy rather than a failure on the part of the writer. The tale surpasses the teller, as Stendhal puts it so eloquently at the end of his other great unfinished work, The Life of Henry Brulard.

The first half of Lucien Leuwen is certainly the most interesting. Featuring the archetypal Stendhalian hero (young, male, Byronic but fiercely introspective), Lucien leaves the home of his parents, joins the army and gets involved in a set of intrigues while garrisoned in a small French town. He falls in love with Bathilde, and the affair is portrayed with typical Stendhalian psychological mastery. Outsmarted by his opponents at the end of the first section, in the second he flees back to Paris in order to live in the shadow of his famous politician father. He joins the Parisian bureaucracy and becomes involved in a whole different set of intrigues.

Stendhal had planned to write a third part, a happy ending, but could not bring himself to do so, preferring to truncate the novel instead of ruining its authenticity. While in some ways this is a novel for the fans (that is to say, start with The Red and the Black if you haven't read any Stendhal), it is definitely worth buying and reading. ( )