5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredibly honest work, November 26, 2010
This review is from: If It Die . . .: An Autobiography (Paperback)
I picked up this book after reading The Immoralist and being stunned at Gide's writing. If It Die is an honest study, an insightful and delving account of Gide's early life, from childhood till his engagement to be married. I found it fascinating.
Here's a writer who really mined his own life in his writing, which makes it all the more awesome to read the kernels of his deepest passions and most fervent, desperately felt works. Some of his descriptions of people are incredibly well-wrought; they spring vividly and startlingly to life.
Gide is also astonishing as a writer who honestly wrote about such themes as homosexuality, masturbation and prostitution, and who struggled against society's constraints upon his very being and essence as given him by God (Gide had a puritanical upbringing). At one point he asks "In the name of what God or what ideal, do you forbid me to live according to my nature?...But I gradually came to wonder whether God really exacted such constraints, whether it was not impious to be in continual rebellion, whether such rebellion was not against Him."
But it's not all about sexuality, of course. He is a very close observer of himself and his friends, and his insights are beautiful even when difficult. Gide met Oscar Wilde and Bosy in Algiers, and shares his impressions of the man, and a sense of how Wilde was perceived and discussed by contemporaries at this point of his life. (Gide felt Wilde was often inhabiting a role, even if the role was himself--and Gide was the one who copied down Wilde's oft quoted line that he'd put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work.)
The other lovely thing in reading Gide is that he reads completely naturally. I find myself forgetting from time to time that he's from a different period, or that he's a "great writer." He seems so real, so alive, so with us...
An incredible read. I'll be buying more Gide books, probably starting with Madeleine--no coincidence, Madeleine tells the story of a man who has married someone he loves but with whom he cannot be in love as he is gay. I've read the tiniest of excerpts and he cracks my heart. Fantastic, honest, courageous writer--and his makings are revealed in this autobiography, in which he goes to great lengths to show his failings, his fears and his self-delusions, as well as his inner strivings. Five stars.
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Of interest, but to who?, November 21, 2010
This review is from: If It Die . . .: An Autobiography (Paperback)
Andre Gide is an author's author -- winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature; a favourite of notable scribes like Yukio Mishima and Donald Richie; one of the fathers of the modern confessional autobiography -- but outside of the academy or academia, this doesn't make him an interesting read.
Concerned to the point of myopia with the triviality of life -- fleeting thoughts, snatched dreams, fears and asides -- If It Die is akin to reading several hundred pages of arbitrary notes -- a stream of consciousness journal rather than a conscious literary work.
Of interest certainly in a few places -- his meetings with Oscar Wilde of particular note -- it is hard nonetheless to recommend this to a reader without a purely academic or literary interest.
This is an account of the years before Gide became an accomplished author, and in all honesty, nothing much is accomplished.
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