This is a strange combination of things.  It is a play from the late 19th century written in verse.  It is sort of a romantic-comedy and sort of a tragedy at the same time.  It has some quite clever scenes.  However, it is sort of quite a bit fluffy and is written as a crowd-pleaser.  Despite the fact that it is told in verse and has a tragic ending, its really not very deep.  It would appear to be a deep meditation on love, but instead what it says on love is at some points trite at some points confused.  Cyrano is a lovable characture, which might be fine but is really fluffy.

There are certain French writers, most notably Dumas, who wrote pure fluffy escapism but because they are French and have some sort of literary trappings, there is a tendency for people to think of them as literature, when they are really escapism.  This play despite the tragedy, despite the verse is really in that tradition.  Entertaining it is.  Great art it isn't.

Because my family has always had loads of books, we have a special closet that contains all the ones that won't fit in the bookshelves. Unlike places I live - which I've always crammed full of bookshelves - my mother likes to have books kept in certain areas. So there are very nice looking old books here and there, and books that are currently being read on various tables - but if you want to find the books to dig through, it's in the book closet. I assume it was once a linen closet, but it's better for books because it has a light inside so you can actually see what you're looking for. And because its shelves are deep there are two rows of books on each shelf - thus the need for keeping it tidy since books are easily hidden in there.

 

Anyway, we were doing some cleaning, which basically meant trying to put the books in some sort of order so that you might actually find things. And because I always say "but I haven't read that yet!" we didn't purge many. But I did notice this book from high school and thought about how it'd been a long time since I read it, and so I glanced inside.

 

wikipedia: Cyrano de Bergerac

wikipedia: Edmond Rostand

 

I ended up rereading it - though I started out by bouncing around to my favorite scenes. And I had to skip over parts where Cyrano has hopes that he might be loved in spite of his nose - I always have problems with "hopes disappointed" scenes, because I do like the character so much. And as melodramatic and theatrical as the final scene is -

Cyrano dies

(spoiler show)

- it made me tear up a bit. Because, ok, honestly I do love this character.

 

Much of the play's emotions you read into the scene - at some parts there are few words and it's up to the actor to express the feelings behind them. Which is why this is a play actors still enjoy performing.

 

Version I read was translated by: Brian Hooker (Amazon link here for more detail)

 

I've said this before about translators - SO much about whether you will love a book can depend on how well they do their job. To discount this is to miss both the difficulty of translating from another language and how much small word choices and phrases can matter.

 

Vay anam!!! Where to start!?
My poor, poor Cyrano! I saw it on TV as a (very small)kid, but never read the Play. Never did I realise, what I had missed all those years!!ONE1!
I have always been of the believe, that people with a beautiful Mind are a thousand times better to love than people with a beautiful Face and/or Physic.
Sadly Cyrano was a troubled man, lacking self esteem & self love thanks to superficial people being the majority in his surroundings and this World in general.
He was trying to hide his vulnerability and integrity(regarding the World) by colouring his every words with stinging, straightforward insults... laced with his dry wit & sarcasm among other things.
It hurt to see, that in the end he sacrificed his own happiness just so as not to hurt & offend(in his eyes) his beloved Roxane.
Oh, and I just kind of might have fallen in love a tiny bit with Le Bret, his friend.
It's available for free at the Gutenberg Project, so please try & read it.

I love this play beyond the telling. It's one of the few single plays I own. The plays I keep on my shelves are complete plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Oscar Wilde, some Moliere, a collection of Spanish classics such as de Barca's La Vida Es Un Sueno and this--one of the few French plays that Americans are likely to see in production or film. Even Steve Martin did a modernized adaptation of it in Roxanne. The thing is that I do agree with the LibraryThing reviewer that counts Cyrano as not someone to admire, rather than the other reviewer on LibraryThing who saw this as a beautiful "unselfish" love. Indeed, Cyrano causes misery all around him because he's unselfish--or too cowardly--to woo his love in his own right. That's the tragedy. But, at least in the translation by Anthony Burgess, so much delights. The back cover says that what this translation has that so many lack is "panache." And yes, this is so witty and sparkling and funny for so much of its length--and poignant and heartbreaking. I have to count as great a playwright who can make me laugh and then cry within the same play.

bookshelves: published-1897, fraudio, classic, france, spring-2010, poetry, play-dramatisation, re-read, swashbuckler, summer-2010, e-book, gutenberg-project