SOURCE: "Downwardly Mobile Mina," in The New York Times Book Review, August 21, 1988, p. 26.

In the following essay, Sieburth offers a favorable appraisal of The Pink and the Green and "Mina de Vanghel."

"Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments," observed Friedrich von Schlegel. "Many of the works of the moderns are fragments at their very inception." If incompletion, as Schlegel suggests, is the crucial condition of modernity, then Stendhal must certainly stand as the most modern of 19th-century authors. He published only three novels during his lifetime—Armance (1827). The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)—but left behind in various stages of gestation a litter of orphaned works that would have to await the 20th century to find their adoptive readers. Lucien Leuwen, a sprawling political novel broken off after some 600 pages, Lamiel, a brilliant but abortive venture into the female picaresque...