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@ Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007 – 00:27:12
January's meeting will be held chez ST in Varen on the 16th at 12pm. The chosen book is the latest translation of Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. The translation is by Robin Buss and he has called it "The Lost Estate".
There's an interesting site in English and French at www.legrandmeaulnes.com
Bit of a cheat this one but I'm packing and making life easy. Check out elizabethbaines.blogspot.com which I discovered and seems to sum it up for me. NB I'm not the Clare in the blog of course.
P.S. I just tried that blog and it doesn't seem to work! - but if you Google Reading Group: Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier it seems to come up as the first entry.
jujulilo
It just worked for me, so it seems to be ok.
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Le Grand Moan
Yes, it is a book which despite the superbly atmospheric evocation of turn of the century rural France, leaves you with an unsympathetic view of the central character; less the great gatsby, rather the big jessie.
I loved the writing and the feel of the translation, I liked the narrator (though he too was a bit of a wimp, and I could imagine that a lost estate could exist where the family wanted to indulge the favourite son in this way. But as a fairy tale it has few redeeming features. The refusal of Meaulnes to acknowledge that a schoolboy passion would lead nowhere - and his fear of doing anything which would substantiate that reality- leaves one feeling that he simply will not grow up.
There were elements that were, by our standards, a bit "soapy", but as it was written in 1913 we can forgive that. Similarly what we would call magic realism and which is rather better done by Marquez, is quite adventurous for the time. But was not "Alice in Wonderland" a successful precursor?
Anyway, though I may sound critical, I really enjoyed reading it again (probably fo the first time in 40 years) and the descriptions and evocations alone make it worthwhile.