On the back of my copy of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), novelist Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, says: “I was in my twenties when I found The Red and the Black – and a friend.”
It was the same for me – and I still think of the novel as a friend. It’s not because anything much good happens in it. The Red and the Black is a story of almost unrelenting hypocrisy and corruption. Rather, the friendship is with Stendhal himself – or at least his wry persona.
