Le Grand Meaulnes

I came to this book through Fowles. It combines the magical realism of Pedro Paramo with the haunting loss of Wuthering Heights. The book is tragic; the greater tragedy is that the author was killed before he could write anything else.

You can read Proust's "Swan's Way" or Tolstoy's "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth" to get a sense of the wonder of childhood, its illusions, dreams and longings. But if you want a bit of mystery, a bit of the dreamlike with your longing for childhood, this is the book. I discovered this book by accident. I was in the French section of my university library, restlessly searching for something to read, something with life to it. I found an earlier Penguin translation by Frank Davidson. It was like discovering an unknown treasure buried amongst the known classics. The first part of this book deals with the discovery of the "Estate", the second part takes on Meaulnes search for his dream girl. It is a small piece but haunting. There are passages you want to return to again and again. This is the book for anyone who wants to reclaim some memory of innocence and simplicity in their lives. It is a golden world, a time before World War I (Alain-Fournier, the author was sadly killed in action on the Meuse in 1914), right after the fin-de-siecle. The book has a beautiful, albeit melancholic tone to it. I won't say more but that it reminds me of the feeling you get when you listen to Debussy piano pieces. If you want something less heavier than Proust and Joyce, something with depth but also wondrous, pick this beautiful work up. This is a rainy, Sunday afternoon read.

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.

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.Fou

I have long been told of the magic of this novel and especially it's impact of the great american painters Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. The haunting images that Alain-Fournier conjures are some of the most enduring in modern literature. The reader is passionately delved into a moonlit world of shadow and circumstance. While finshing the book I started missing the dream he created and was so sad the book was ending that upon the moment of competion I picked it back up and read it cover to cover again. It is terrifying to imagine what Alain-Fournier would have accomplished if not for his untimely death.