Sons Of Kings: (Les Pléiades)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean to be truly noble in a world that no longer recognises nobility? Sons of Kings, originally published in French as Les Pléiades, is Joseph-Arthur Gobineau's ambitious and philosophically charged novel that follows three exceptional young men — each a son of kings in spirit if not always in title — as they navigate a disenchanted 19th-century Europe, wrestling with questions of identity, destiny, and the burden of greatness in an age of mediocrity. Rich in irony and aristocratic melancholy, the narrative unfolds across drawing rooms and landscapes that feel simultaneously vibrant and elegiac, rendered with the cool, precise prose of a man who viewed civilisation with both passion and profound scepticism. Gobineau, best known historically as a theorist and diplomat, reveals himself in this work to be a novelist of considerable psychological depth and stylistic elegance, weaving together the threads of Romanticism and realism into a tapestry that anticipates Nietzsche's meditations on the exceptional individual. Douglas Parmée's accomplished translation, accompanied by his scholarly introduction, makes this long-overlooked masterwork fully accessible to the Anglophone reader, restoring to it the wit and philosophical urgency of the original. For those who relish novels of ideas in the tradition of Stendhal and Turgenev, Sons of Kings is a rediscovery waiting to be made.
Author: Joseph-Arthur Gobineau
Format: Hardback
Published: 1966, Oxford University Press
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean to be truly noble in a world that no longer recognises nobility? Sons of Kings, originally published in French as Les Pléiades, is Joseph-Arthur Gobineau's ambitious and philosophically charged novel that follows three exceptional young men — each a son of kings in spirit if not always in title — as they navigate a disenchanted 19th-century Europe, wrestling with questions of identity, destiny, and the burden of greatness in an age of mediocrity. Rich in irony and aristocratic melancholy, the narrative unfolds across drawing rooms and landscapes that feel simultaneously vibrant and elegiac, rendered with the cool, precise prose of a man who viewed civilisation with both passion and profound scepticism. Gobineau, best known historically as a theorist and diplomat, reveals himself in this work to be a novelist of considerable psychological depth and stylistic elegance, weaving together the threads of Romanticism and realism into a tapestry that anticipates Nietzsche's meditations on the exceptional individual. Douglas Parmée's accomplished translation, accompanied by his scholarly introduction, makes this long-overlooked masterwork fully accessible to the Anglophone reader, restoring to it the wit and philosophical urgency of the original. For those who relish novels of ideas in the tradition of Stendhal and Turgenev, Sons of Kings is a rediscovery waiting to be made.