The Immoralist (Paperback)

by André Gide (Author), Richard Howard (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
With today's headlines and talk shows, it takes a lot to shock a reader--certainly more than was required in 1902, when André Gide's The Immoralist was first published. What was seen then as a story of dereliction translates today into a tale of introspection and fierce self-discovery. While traveling to Tunis with his new bride, the Parisian scholar Michel is overcome by tuberculosis. As he slowly convalesces, he revels in the physical pleasures of living and resolves to forgo his studies of the past in order to experience the present--to let "the layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there."

But this is not the Michel his colleagues knew, nor the man Marceline married, and he must hide his new values under the patina of what he now reviles. Bored by Parisian society, he moves to a family farm in Normandy. He is happy there, especially in the company of young Charles, but he must soon return to the city and academe. Michel remains restless until he gives his first lecture and runs into Ménalque, who has long outraged society, and recognizes in him a reflection of his torment. Finally, Michel heads south, deeper into the desert, until, as he confides to his friends, he is lost in the sea of sand, under a clear, directionless sky.

What Gide's story lacks in sensationalism is fulfilled by his descriptive prose, which evokes the exotic nature of Michel's inner and outer journey: "I did not understand the forbearance of this African earth, submerged for days at a time and now awakening from winter, drunk with water, bursting with new juices; it laughed in this springtime frenzy whose echo, whose image I perceived within myself." --Joannie Kervran Stangeland

Product Description
'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - Andre Gide. Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost. And freedom itself, he finds, can be a burden. Gide's novel examines the inevitable conflicts that arise when a pleasure seeker challenges conventional society and, without moralizing, it raises complex issues involving the extent of personal responsibility. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 13, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679741917
• ISBN-13: 978-0679741916
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #686,903 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self-truth at Any Cost, September 23, 2000

By	Grace (California, USA) - See all my reviews

The Immoralist is straightforward in language and easy to read, but more complicated, more complex are its themes: Man's sense of morality towards society, family, himself. What happens when man's values conflict with those of society's? Whose interests should be served? Gide explores these themes through one man's odyssey of self-discovery. The protagonist is the learned and conflicted Michel who yearns for something more than the stable, predictable, familiar life he has always known, but no longer finds tolerable. It is after a life-threatening bout of tuberculosis that these feelings rise to the surface, intensify, and are more keenly felt.

This hunger, still unidentified, takes him on a journey, both literal and figurative, where his search for self-awareness, or self-truth, carries him to distant and exotic locales. New experiences and mysterious encounters give way to a new aestheticism in which weakness, constraint, and life's banalities play no role. Heightened senses, unsuppressed impulses erode age-old human values that were once accepted blindly.

A life less checked, though, can have consequences, as is the case for Michel, and for so many others like him. As Michel becomes stronger, his wife becomes weaker. Indeed, society becomes weaker. How can the newly strong fail to quash the weak in their path? The question one must ask, then, and Gide does, is whether a life without restraint has value. Is there something admirable in the old adage, "To thine own self be true"?

One of the novel's most inspired moments is found in its ending. Without giving anything away, it is the last passage, after the reader has come full-circle, where Michel's journey seemingly ends. Will Michel embrace his new truth? The reader is left to wonder. The Immoralist is told in narrative, in Michel's own voice. It is self-confessional literature at its highest, and should be read by anyone who reads to think and be moved.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beehive of Life, February 5, 2001

By	Francois Meursault (PARIS) - See all my reviews

"Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; the difficult thing is knowing how to live with that freedom"- this is the ultimate lesson that Gide gives in "The Immoralist", even though as he himself has said "I refrained from passing judgement". As a result this novel will always be open to interpretation, as it presents the classic universal problem of individual freedom, identity, and what constitutes 'life'.

Michel, the novel's main character is awakened from his life-long "lethargy" with a fierce desire to change his mask, or rather to find his real self hidden behind the layers of adopted morality, education, and social obligations. He used to be a strict young scholar interested only in "ruins and books". Now he wants to be free of all obligation and inhibition to fully experience the pleasure and sensuality brought about by his late homosexual awakening. To do so, he sacrifices wife, career, and wealth. The conflict within Michel is not only that of morality v. sexuality, but mostly that of thought v. emotion, or more simplistically brain v. heart. When he sees his awakened sensuality mirrored in the beauty of nature to which he now becomes aware, Michel discovers that "what was the point of thinking? I felt extraordinarily..."

What constitutes "life"? This is another important question raised in "The Immoralist". Michel is reborn when he begins questioning his life: "after all what did I mean by `living'?" Even here the flaws in Michel's philosophy are apparent. The Christian doctrine of "blessed are the poor" goes against Michel's doctrine of a leisurely, sensuous life and that "poverty makes slaves of men", and yet he strives to get rid of his possessions...

Who am I? What do I want? These are the kind of questions the reader will ask himself while reading "The Immoralist". The author is too wise to give definite answers to such great questions. Neither does Gide encourage the reader to decide who is wiser, Marceline, or Michel? Thus Gide succeeds in being more truthful and believable in the presentation of the problem, in the "drawing of the picture". As to the answers, who knows anyway, this novel makes you inquisitive about the meaning that is created...

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entirely Too Perfect, February 17, 2000

By	la (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

Many readers of this book are inclined to compare it with the works of Camus. I grant that The Immoralist does suggest existential questions but, unlike Camus' La Chute (for instance), it simply presents the life and actions of the anti-hero without his actual and deliberate existential questioning. This is the subtle richness of Gide's writing. The Immoralist presents a unique disparity in the lavishness in description of setting, and the relatively spare characterizations. Gide does not glorify, chastise nor condemn his Michel. Michel is simply what he is, what he has become. This novel is filled with brilliant writing, lines of which one can't help but memorize. For instance, "The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task." and also, "You cannot be sincere and at the same time seem so." Having read both Bussy's pioneer translation and Howard's later one, I much prefer the latter. It's a far more exact translation.