Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant And Magical - An Unforgettable Novel!, November 26, 2003
"Le Grand Meaulnes" is, simply put, a beautiful novel. A friend recommended it to me recently, and after reading it once I know I will keep it to read over and over again. Alain-Fournier has written, with heartbreaking poignance, about a magical period between boyhood and manhood; a time that once gone can never be recaptured. The book's title has shifted over the years from "The Grand Meaulnes," to "The Wanderer," and then "The Lost Domain." Alain-Fournier writes about a boy who is called "Le Grand Meaulnes" by his friends and fellow schoolmates. What does "Grand" mean? The novel's translator writes: "No English adjective will convey all the shades of meaning that can be read into the simple word 'grand' which takes on overtones as the story progresses. 'Le Grand Meaulnes' can be 'the tall,' 'the big,' 'the almost-grown-up,' even 'the great Meaulnes' - or with schoolboys, even 'good old Meaulnes.' But when the book has been put down, that phrase evokes in retrospect the image of someone not only tall or big, but also daring, noble, tragic, fabulous." And Augustin Meaulnes is all those things - as he is also a wanderer, searching for a lost domain.The tale is set in France in the late 1800s. Our narrator is Francois Seurel, the somewhat sheltered, adolescent son of Sainte-Agathe's secondary schoolmaster. A new border comes to the school, Augustin Meaulnes, bringing adventure and a breath of fresh air into Francois' peaceful, rather sedate life. The charismatic young man easily becomes the leader of the schoolboys and much admired by all. He is definitely not flamboyant nor a show-off, but a rather quiet, serious and sometimes introspective young man. Yet he has tremendous imagination and leads the boys on childish exploits, "bold and dangerous." One day Meaulnes disappears on what the others believe is a seemingly harmless prank - an adventure. When he returns, 3 days later, he is forever changed. He becomes reclusive and obsessively works on a map he is making. He loses interest in everything and everyone, except for Francois, who has become his only confident. The day Meaulnes disappeared from the schoolhouse, he became lost and disoriented. After an anxious overnight stop, in the middle of nowhere, he found himself in the midst of a grand and fantastic celebration in a forest clearing. The festival was held to celebrate the wedding of young Frantz de Galais and his beloved bride. At this feast, Augustin Meaulnes met the beautiful, gentle, mysterious Yvonne, Frantz' sister. Tragically, the wedding never took place, the party was disbanded, and Meaulnes, forced to take leave immediately, lost sight of Yvonne - his fairy-princess, his love dream of adolescence. He returned to Sainte-Agathe but remained haunted by memories of the magic place, its trappings and most of all, Yvonne. Meaulnes' time was now almost exclusively spent trying to find his way back, but since he didn't know how he arrived at the domain, he didn't know how to return. Disconsolate, he wrote down everything he remembered about his trip and began his mapmaking. He promised Francois that he could accompany him when he finally makes his way back to the lost domain. Together the two friends attempt to retrace Meaulnes' footsteps. They journey together into the world of adulthood, trying to close the circle between what had been and what was yet to be. Alain-Fournier's descriptive prose is exquisite. His narrative frequently reads like pure poetry, filled with magical imagery. I must say a few words here about Frank Davison's superb and faithful translation. Without Mr. Davison's work, I would not have been able to appreciate Fournier's prose. This story of friendship and love, of vows broken and vows kept, is one of the most original and unique books I have ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough. What makes this novel even more poignant is that the author was killed, at age 27, in the first actions of WWI. I was overwhelmed by sadness when I learned of this terrible loss. Alain-Fournier will always be remembered through his wonderful work.
JANA
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
unforgettable, October 16, 2000
This is one of those little remembered novels whose remaining fans firmly believe it to be one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the 20th Century. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy and Halldor Laxness's Independent People inspire similarly fanatical devotion in small groups of faithful adherents. In this case though, one of the devoted fans just happens to be the great novelist John Fowles who proselytizes relentlessly for it, including writing the afterword to the edition I read, and crediting it as the inspiration for his first novel, The Magus (itself a Modern Library Top 100 entry). I don't know that I'm willing to join them yet, but all three of these cults may have a point. At any rate, The Wanderer, or, Le Grande Meaulnes, to give it the original French title, is certainly a unique and wonderful book.The Wanderer of the title is Augustin Meaulnes, a charismatic, restless, youth who transfers to Sainte Agathe school in Sologne and befriends Francois Seurel, whose parents are teachers at the school. Meaulnes quickly earns the nickname Le Grand, or The Great, both because of his height and because he is the kind of natural leader who other boys flock to and emulate. The author portrays the school as an island, cut off from the rest of the world, and Meaulnes as the castaway who is most anxious to get off. He runs away several times and on one occasion has a mystical experience which will shape the course rest of the rest of the boys' lives. When Francois's grandparents come to visit, another boy is chosen to accompany the cart to town to get them, but Meaulnes sneaks off in the carriage. Irretrievably lost, he stumbles upon a pair of young actors who take him to a dreamlike masquerade ball at a sumptuous estate. There he meets Yvonne de Galais, a beautiful young blonde, with whom he becomes hopelessly infatuated. They spend only a few moments together and do little more than exchange names, but this fairy tale adventure becomes the pivotal experience of his life, one which he, with the help of Francois, will spend the rest of his life trying to recapture, with tragic consequences. Alain-Fournier was the pen name of Henri-Alban Fournier (there was another, already popular, writer of the day named Henri Fournier.) The novel is apparently very autobiographical : his parents were teachers; the boys supposedly incorporate aspects of his own character; and, most importantly, he had an experience on June 5, 1905, wherein he, age 18, encountered a beautiful young woman named Yvonne in the streets of Paris. This event became a central moment in his life. He imagined a parallel reality, or Domain, which we only come in contact with during such transcendent moments and he became obsessed with recapturing his. This imbues his writing with a profound nostalgia, a melancholic sense that those moments of epiphany that we experience can never be retrieved, that the best parts of life lie behind us, not ahead. Fournier was killed in battle on September 22, 1914, fighting on the Meuse. Dead before his twenty-eighth birthday, this was his only finished novel, though Fowles suggests that his letters are also worth reading. In a sense, this is a novel that we would have expected from someone who survived WWI (see Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier), harkening back as it does to departed days of youth. His obsession with one event in his life suggests that Fournier might never have done much more than rewrite this story in subsequent years, but it's useless to speculate. What we do know is that he left behind one poignant and haunting novel which, rightly or wrongly, captures the inchoate sense of lost innocence and opportunity missed that we all feel at one time or another. Masterpiece or not, it is certainly unforgettable. GRADE : A
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Le Grand romantic obsession, December 2, 2003
This little novel is the kind of literature that has everything to be appealing and unforgettable. It is set in one of the most beautiful parts of France, a distant, remote land of forests, lagoons and castles. It recounts a tale of childhood and adolescence, a time of innocence long lost and of hazy adventures in the long evenings and vacations of school times. It involves a glimpse of total bliss and the dream of permanent and absolute happiness. It verges on the border between reality and fantasy.The story is told by Francois Seurel, the son of the schoolmaster in a small, secluded town in la Sologne (Central France). One day a new kid comes to study and live with Francois's family. He is called Le Grand (the great) Meaulnes. He's a natural leader and an independent kid who one day steals a carriage in order to go pick up Francois's great parents. He gets lost in the woods and loses the carriage, which forces him to wander around the countryside where, after some time, he comes to an ancient domain, a big, decaying house where a huge party is about to begin. He notices everybody seems to be welcome and after a nap in a bedroom he finds old-style clothes seeminlgy ready for him to wear. So he does and he goes to the party. At some point he meets "the" girl, the most beautiful living being he's ever seen, and of course he falls madly in love with her. But she's mysterious and they will only have chance to exchange names. The day after, the party ends on enigmatic circumstances and Meaulnes gets a ride home at night, and so he is unable to figure out the way back to the house. The rest of his life will be one long and tragic search for the place and the girl of his dreams, and to reveal more would be unkind to potential readers. As with basically all other books that can aspire to immortality, this one can be read in many levels. You can simply take the story at face value and appreciate it as a great tale, but for me it was impossible not to glimpse some kind of deep symbolism in it, something about the nostalgia for innocence lost, for the irretrievable days of our youth, for the kind of love that is hard to feel later on in life (for good and bad). There is also something about that old notion of being careful with what you wish for, lest you achieve it. The book borders around the realistic, the romantic and the gothic, and it has its touches of magic which are highlighted by the incredible scenery in which the story takes place. It is probably one of the greatest tales ever told and it sure will agitate in the reader their own memories of countryside vacations and that little girl one once saw, fell in love wiht, but was unable to see again (or maybe yes, but in less romantic circumstances). It achieves what great literature does: sparkling something valuable, in this case totally bittersweet, inside the reader's brain, and it is only possible to regret Fournier's early death in that stupidest of massacres, WWI.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Alain-Fournier
DVD ~ Brigitte Fossey
by Howard Vincent Hong
by Colette
by Théophile Gautier
