Stendhal the Sollersian: A Twenty-First-Century Autoportrait

Under cover of a love story, Sollers's 2011 Tresor d'amour is actually a highly personal essay about Stendhal, its plot merely a thin pretext to quote extensively from Stendhal's writings and to discuss his life and his love affairs. Sollers's autobiographical protagonist channels Stendhal throughout, expanding the horizon of Stendhal's continuing presence and surreptitiously placing Stendhal before a twenty-first-century readership. Adding to his own multiple self-portrait, Sollers now gives us to understand a changed and richer Stendhal: Sollers shows us a Stendhal for our time that even Stendhal did not realize he could be, because Sollers sees himself in the nineteenth-century writer and takes the trouble to illustrate this resurrection in a long work. In his idiosyncratic manner, Sollers shows how Stendhal's presence has never been more persuasive than it is today.