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Loading... Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)by Alain-Fournier (Author)
Amo questo libro perché vi ho ritrovato una cosa che ho sempre sostenuto: la perfezione della finitezza dei bei momenti.In altre parole: nella vita è possibile che capitino dei momenti perfetti (o che a noi appaiono tali), delle esperienza fantastiche di cui si teme la conclusione. Eppure questa conclusione viene e l'esperienza diventa ricordo di felicità, da lasciare sullo scaffale della memoria e riprendere in mano ogni tanto con nostalgia.
Ma guai a voler ricreare quel momento davvero: il suo fascino svanirebbe perché esso è stato unicamente frutto di un "qui e ora" che mai potrà tornare. E Meaulnes e Alain-Fournier me lo hanno dimostrato ancora una volta.
Stupendo. (  ) Tonari | May 19, 2013 |  The book of tenderness. Every young man or woman has to read this book before going into the world. EddiLint | Apr 21, 2013 | Dear Henri Alain-Fournier, Some people claim you had great talent as a novelist. Many more would claim I don't. Is it fair that you died in World War I while I live, free to write this review and feeling like I'm having a bad morning because I didn't have all the usual ingredients for my breakfast shake? Your remains weren't identified until 1991, true, but do you know that without yogurt, steel cut oatmeal, goji berries and banana congeal like pond scum when blended with almond milk? I guess in a way translated works of fiction are like that, lacking an ingredient. Not really fair of me to judge you then, is it? And on top of that, I read somewhere that the Robin Buss translation I have isn't the best. I don't know. Maybe I've been prejudiced against anything French because there's been a creepy mime wandering around the farmers' market on Saturdays. With the summer heat, its face make-up starts to melt and peel and it scares my kid and me. Or maybe, having discovered Woody Allen before James Dean, it's because I'm sentimental for my own sort of coming-of-age story. But the truth is, I found your novel sappy. Sappy to the nth degree. "And that evening, sobbing, he asked Mademoiselle de Galais for her hand in marriage." Barf. Some folks describe it as dream-like. Well, I'll meet them halfway and say that it is conducive to a dream-like state, in as much as I found myself wanting to fall asleep as I read it. God! Germany probably invaded France so often to keep from nodding off. Can you blame them? They had all those big philosophical treatises to write, but then kept getting distracted by the latest Twilight prequel. And they would've even read it in the original French because all you Continentals speak five languages! I tried to make excuses for you, thinking, "Look at it this way: it's a parable for post-colonial France. They were just coming off that Napoleonic high and had to simultaneously deal with the onset of modernity. It's a simple case of British/penis envy." But even my credulity can only stretch so far. Goodbye, Alain-Fournier. Sorry your life was cut short by one of history's celebrated mistakes. Maybe this book will mean something to somebody else. It's going to have the opportunity, because I'm donating it to my library. (  ) KidSisyphus | Apr 5, 2013 | Never have I found it more difficult to finish a lovelier book. My first attempt was derailed five years ago; the second was ultimately successful only after a three-month hiatus. And this little volume carried so much weight by now, as a favourite of several people - exes, friends, the hard-to-label - from different times and places in my life ... all of which have something of the partially-lost domain about them. I started reading it again in a sunny May garden surrounded by birdsong - the first time I'd had a garden to myself; it proved the perfect place and bestowed the magic for the book to take on its own life. It's so delicately perfect that I hesitate to describe it and review it in my clumsy words. I was in the vicinity of the verge of tears for most of the story, yet not upset. The descriptions of the seasons are some of the prettiest I can recall. Most of this book is a beautiful bittersweet dream. Occasionally, it is like waking in a sweat and wondering, cursing, why the hell one did something. Though being characters in a highly romanticised novel, these people do take some of their actions to extremes. Meaulnes contains elements of many - more recently written - books I've already read, yet it never palled. As Augustin and Francois glimpse an enchanting place, reading this felt like seeing a source of favourite stories and ideas. ( ) antonomasia | Apr 4, 2013 | Set in the late 1800s to early 1900s, this story evokes images of life in a very different sort of era. The interwoven tale of the 3 main male protagonists is a bit too wistful for my taste. However, it had a definite effect on me. (  ) alexandriaginni | Apr 3, 2013 |
...Good bookshops, though, will have one copy. Usually it is just the one, thin and a little bit tired at the edges. Often the sellers won't need to replace it more than once or twice a decade - I bought a copy recently; the shop hadn't sold another in 13 years - but that's not the point: the kind of bookseller who stocks Le Grand Meaulnes doesn't really do so for good business. If you're going to run a bookshop, you had better love books, after all, and if you love books, then Le Grand Meaulnes is the kind of novel you'll want to have around. If you talk to people about this book, you'll notice something interesting: not only have a lot of them read it, but they're still reading it. How and where they get hold of it is a mystery - possibly they are finding it on the shelves of better-read relatives (which is what I did myself). Some books succeed by word of mouth; Le Grand Meaulnes survives by even less than that, a barely audible system of Chinese whispers.But it remains a book that writers turn to; perhaps as much as any modern novel, it has a style which has echoed through the works of others. Despite the confusion of its titles and its dog-eared thinness and its faults, this is arguably one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Henri Alban Fournier was born in La Chapelle d'Anguillon in the Sologne in 1886; he was killed in battle on the Meuse, aged 27, in September 1914. The son of a schoolmaster, Fournier was sketching out both a play and a second novel at the outset of war, but his reputation rests almost exclusively on his only complete work of fiction, which narrowly missed winning the Prix Goncourt...
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