Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Chateau

The Chateau

Maxwell, William

Paperback

HumorMystery & ThrillerLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 067976156X
ISBN13: 9780679761563
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: Nov 7 1995
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.19
Height: 1.03 Width: 5.58 Depth: 8.56
Language: English
From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a sage and luminously observed novel of Americans abroad.

I can think of few novels . . . that have such romantic authority as The Chateau, fewer still so adult in vitality, so alight with humor. --Elizabeth Bowen

It is 1948 and a battered France is just beginning to receive its first American tourists since the war. Perhaps it is not ready for them. Or perhaps they are not ready for France.

For although Harold and Barbara Rhodes, a young American couple arriving for a holiday, are enchanted by the small perfections that greet them at the Chateau Beaumesnil and tolerant of the lack of such amenitites as sugar and hot water, there is much that bewilders them. Is their hostess, the gallant Mme Vienot, flirting with Harold? Will they ever win the approval of the impeccably connected M. Carriere and his forbidding wife? Can American eagerness and goodwill ever decipher the ancient codes of French civility? In a voice that is by turns rapturous and ironic, and with an eye that looks kindly on both the beautiful and the absurd, William Maxwell creates the most astute and affectionate portraayal of the meeting of two cultures since the masterworks of Henry James.

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