Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Immoralist by Andre Gide ISBN: 0-679-74191-7 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 February, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Entirely Too Perfect
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: The will to live
Comment: The Immoralist is a book about a historian of ancient civilization, named Michel. We follow him on extensive journeys throughout North Africa and Southern Europe, but more importantly we follow his inner journey from a decent, respectable, constrained man to a man of passion, energy and carelessness. It starts on his honeymoon in North Africa, where he becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis. His illness makes him change from a moral self to a living self, and he becomes less interested in his work and his wife than in little Arab boys, whom he finds spontaneous and full of life. His mind is constantly at work considering the antithesis between culture and nature, whether he is studying the fall of Rome or his apple orchard in Normandy. He tries to balance passion, individuality and natural inclinations with history, culture, and morals, but in the end he is overwhelmed by his desire to live unrestrained and free. He declares "I detest all principled people",he favors the desert over the planted field and drunken sailors over socialites, he fornicates with an Arab dancer on the eve of his wife's death. Stories of incest and rape on his own estate intrigue him rather than spur him to action, and as a widower he lives with a young boy after dumping the boy's sister, a teenage prostitute. Gide manages to make this slippery slope of debauchery and outrageous selfishness somehow comprehensible, but it is unclear what conclusions we are to draw after reading The Immoralist. Like the anti-hero of Mann's Death in Venice, Michel is unable to control his own desires, or rather he no longer attempts to control them. "I create the newness of each hour by completely forgetting yesterday," says Michel's friend Menalcas. At the same time, Michel's fleeting moments of happiness are interspersed with moments of suffering and guilt. And what about his wife? Gide doesn't really go into the results of treating other human beings merely as obstacles or instruments in one's own quest for fulfillment.
Rating: 4
Summary: Inner struggle between feelings and societal views
Comment: One evening, Michel calls together three of his close friends from his school days to relate a story to them and to let them decide for themselves what should be done:
Michel and his new bride, Marceline, are traveling through Northern Africa on their honeymoon when Michel comes down with tuberculosis. During his recouperation in Biskra, Algeria, Marceline does all she can to nurse him back to health. He slowly recovers, but something in him has changed. Michel loves his Marceline, but disdains her company, preferring to be surrounded by the young boys of the area, in particular Moktir, whom he spies stealing from Marceline.
When the weather changes, he and Marceline return to his family farm in Normandy, hoping that this change will evince an even stronger change in him. He strikes up a close friendship with Charles, the 17-year-old son of the farm's manager, and begins to spend more and more time with him, trying to find any excuse he can to be away from Marceline and in the company of Charles.
Throughout the novel, Michel struggles with his new yearnings for what may, at the time the novel takes place, be considered the immoral things: his attraction to young men and to the darker side of society, while trying to maintain his marriage. Plus, he has to hide his new feelings behind a false acceptance of society, and it just tears him inside that he must act that way. I alternatley felt sympathy for him as he attempted to understand the new emotions that resulted from his near-death expereince with tuberculosis, and loathing him for his treatment of Marceline who understood what was going on and yet remained by Michel's side.
A fascinating character study.
 |
Title: The Counterfeiters : A Novel by Andre Gide ISBN: 0394718429 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 June, 1973 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
 |
Title: If It Die . . . : An Autobiography by Andre Gide ISBN: 0375726063 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Frechtman ISBN: 0802130135 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: August, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
 |
Title: Lafcadio's Adventures : A Novel by Andre Gide ISBN: 0375713387 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
 |
Title: The Stranger by ALBERT CAMUS ISBN: 0679720200 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
