I wish I had read L’Immoraliste around the year 1904. That would have been about two years after it was published and about two years before Picasso started distorting eyes and mouths and jaws and limbs in his painted prostitutes.

I am trying to picture myself dressed in yards and yards of bombazine, chiffon and lace, shapely cut to follow my already markedly thin waist, thanks to those bone stays that have cinched it into a harness, sorry, a corset. I need to feel the effort of breathing in, la More...

Well written, but ultimately unsatisfying. I'm certain that I would have a stronger feeling about this book if I lived during a time when homosexuals were made to repress their true selves, imperialism was the word of the day, monotony was taking over the workforce, Arabs were looked down upon by much of western culture, tourists paid meager rates to third-world children for labor services and sexual favors, a huge percentage of visual artists and intellectuals were snobby and pretentious, too m More...

i feel a little dirty reading this sandwiched between all my children's books for class. kids, take three giant steps back from gide... i think i loved this book, but i think i may want to read another translation. who knows from translations?? i have the richard howard one here, and i know he's like a star in the french/english translation world but i didn't like his introduction to this so much, and was wondering if there might be another recommended translation? i liked this book a lot, despi More...

If you are a bisexual, will you marry?

Andre Gide (1869-1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. So, this book, despite its theme on homosexuality, should not be brand or worse, mock, as another gay lit book.

The story revolves around a bisexual man, Michel, who has devoted his early years to his studies so he becomes a scholar. Then, to please his dying father, he gets himself a wife, Marceline and the young couple goes to North Africa for their honeymoon. A More...

I've never felt that it is in any way important to like or admire the main character in a novel. It seems to me far more important that language and structure should be used to support a narrative that convinces us about the authenticity of everything that happens within the novel. So it is with 'The Immoralist'

I dislike Michel, the narrator and central character of the book, but I am persuaded that everything he does in the book is, for him, unavoidable. With every advance in his thinking, as h More...

I read this book when I was in high school and did not appreciate it. Fortunately, I returned to it and have read it several times since then. While I think The Counterfeiters is a better novel I still hold this novella in great esteem. Gide's approach to the erotic continues to amaze me. The similarity of his demonstration of eros here with Thomas Mann's approach in his novella, Death in Venice, is striking. Both are imbued with the influence of Nietzsche, but Mann takes a more classical philos More...

In realtà sono 2.5 . Giusto perché la notte porta consiglio. Voglio dire, se avessi scritto ieri sera questa review, di stellina ce ne sarebbe stata una. Perché questo libro lascia un po’ con la bocca asciutta. Anzi diciamo la verità: te la bagna poco sin dall’inizio. Diciamo che per dissetarti devi stare lì a scavare con le unghie per far sgorgar fuori un po’ d’acqua.

Questo Michel, dopo essersi sposato con Marceline, che stima molto ma che poco ama, si ammala e, quando sta lì per lì per morir More...

I have a hard time discussing why I did and did not like this book. It is a real time piece, part of the history of white European males going to Africa, or the Arab world (in this case, largely Northern Africa - covering both the African phenomenon and the Arab one). Not quite the power of The Stranger, this book doesn't have the cultural currency of Camus' work, but is definitely part of that dialogue. I don't know if, at this point in history, that dialogue is so fascinating. Gide's book flir More...

Andre Gide's small confession is a key work of French modernism. In a way this novel is a precursor to Camus' Stranger, though it is much more elegant and subtle than the latter.

Michel is the titular Immoralist, a man determined to live life fully without the arbitrary constrictions of religion or morality. He is recently married to a woman he admits he does not love; but when he falls ill to tuberculosis her loving comfort wins him over.

Together they travel throughout the beautiful coast of I More...

I think my problem with this book is that I've heard this all before. And better said. This novel said it a long time before they did, and it got blasted for it. It was a huge controversy since this deals with sexual confusion, a rebellion against colonialist/imperialist values, a rebellion against the inertia and the status quo. That's all great, but it's done so simplisticially. It's like reading the blueprint for the rebellion/inner transformation novel. And the problem is that it's just a li More...

The Immoralist begins with a letter, with the writer wondering how to react to the confession he has just heard from his friend Michel. From there, we read the confession of which he speaks. Michel tells the story of his marriage to Marceline, and the process of self-discovery that has compelled him to call his friends together to tell them about it.

I was under the impression before reading it that the immorality referred to in the title was homosexuality, and it is - to a degree. However, that More...

In the end, I just could not put up with the protagonist. The philosophical and spiritual content of the work was not fair compensation for being burdened with the character, even for a short time. This book is linked with The Stranger in many reviews and essays but other than a basic premise to un-define the norm, I see little in common with how the authors and their protagonists approached this premise. Meursault obliterates his own self. Michel turns his whole being into self. Moreover, Camus More...

The immoralist follows a self-absorbed, contradictory, judgemental, aimless protagonist with possible gay tendencies when it comes to young boys. A lot of the text felt very masterbatory, like Gide is just stroking his own ego. Most of what he probably felt was insightful writing was convoluted and didn't really make sense when you actually thought about it. Now if this was on purpose due to the nature of the protagonist, I can accept that, but it still doesn't make it worthwhile to me.

Positive More...

Honestly, this is the kind of book I want to have a nice long discussion about with nerds. We could pick apart the nuances, page-by-page, with of course the original edition as a comparison where some particular wording seems uncertain. Also, because this was written at a time when explicit mentions of sex probably would be grounds for excommunication from society (I'm exaggerating...somewhat), I could really have used footnotes to confirm or scatter my suspicions that a whole bunch of sex was g More...

C'est une histoire frappante, qui rassemble au Tod in Vendig ou L'Etrangère ou Damien de Hermann Hesse. C'est certainement un roman existentialiste. Comme quelqu'un a deja remarqué, il faut le lire conjoitement avec "La Porte Etroite" a L'un côté l'esxtreme de foi relgieuse, à l'autre l'extrême qui est le nihilisme. Si nous n'aimons pas le roman c'est peut être nous mêmes qui nous ne plaisent pas. L'immoraliste c'est un jeune homme qui abandonne son vie burgeoise et correct a fin de se submerger More...

I wish I had been able to read this in the original French, but alas! I had to settle for the English translation available at my library. I felt it was quite well done, but I could only think of how lovely it probably was in French.

Really, nothing prompted me to pick this up other than it being on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die (which I take with a grain of salt, mind, but it is helpful for picking out things I normally wouldn't), so I began with no presuppositions, except More...

At the beginning of this book, the young protagonist throws himself on the mercy of his friends. "Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objective liberty is a burden to me." He relates his story: as his father is dying and because of his own weak, other worldly character he gets married without thinking of its consequences. He has been so under the control of his very Puritanical mother (until More...

At the turn of the 20th Century, Michel, the sickly intellectual and landowner who is the protagonist of Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, marries Marceline without being in love to please his dying father. In their honeymoon, Michel’s consumption worsens and Marceline, who is described as strong, nurses him in his weakness. But as soon as Michel recovers his health, he begins to go out alone and gallivant in the company of a long succession of young and handsome boys. He describes one, for example, More...

Somewhat dated novel that likely shocked the world at one time with its cauldron of homophilic emotion bubbling to the surface. Still, the emphasis of the book is less on sex, sexuality or a masochistic destructive trait that masquerades as latent cruelty; it is fundamentally a sartre cousin that seeks to build a world on new foundations.

Life without preconceived social morals or how an individual discovers life by turning everything aside in a deliberate act to become society's Job. In this st More...

I loved the first half of it and was constantly copying down lines. I loved the water imagery. I loved his awakened passion for life after sickness. I loved his questioning everything he thought he had known about the meaning in life. But then it morphs into his not really caring about anything, which appears to be a commentary on how he has chosen to reject religion. His ultimate crime then is when he gets his wife to reject religion as well.

I liked this book, but it ultimately disappointed me More...

André Gide's "L'immoraliste" was published in precisely the same year as Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," 1902. These works are similar in at least two respects: first, each is a framed narrative--a story told to friends--and thereby distanced slightly from the reader; second, and more importantly for this review, each is an excursion into an inner reality, some "authenticity" that lies beyond the worlds of facade and convention. Conrad's book, at least so it seems to me, is a journey to Kur More...

Some books wear well when revisited decades later. Lolita, another tale of pedophilia, remains brilliant for many moral and aesthetic reasons. The Awakening, another story of "self-discovery," now seems more a story of selfish self-destruction. The Immoralist is far less enjoyable than when I read it during the waning days of the hippie era.

In my first reading, I was put-off by the homosexuality, but I enjoyed the depiction of exotic places, and I shared in the narrator's denunciation of his Pro More...

Absolutely stunning portrayal of a French Catholic repressive confronting his (homo) sexuality at the turn of last century. I deliberately write ‘confronting’ rather than ‘journey of discovery’, ‘development’ or any other word which might imply a process of evolvement leading to clarity or even acceptance, for this is singularly missing. What unravels instead, is a sublime subconscious, torturous confrontation, an unwanted, unspoken clash of instinct and reason. And this is what makes the fibre More...

Récit d’un chassé-croisé vers le sud, celui d’une renaissance moniste où Michel, protagoniste transfiguré opère sa mue, laissant barbe et confort derrière lui tel une peau de serpent surannée. Apologue d’un élan vitaliste après la maladie l’ayant mené au bord du précipice.



Michel, historien exhumant jadis les héros archaïques, tourne résolument le dos aux témoins du passés : « le souvenir est une invention de malheur » (P. 172.). À la vitalité ancestrale d’Athalaric il préfère désormais celle de More...

This fine little book is best when eschewing philosophy for fiction and telling a story filled with metaphor about a man undergoing a transition if not a revelation.

André Gide asserts the following at the outset:

But the real interest of a work and the interest taken in it by the public of the moment are two very different things. One may without too much conceit, I think, prefer the risk of failing to interest the moment by what is genuinely interesting - to beguiling momentarily a public fond o More...

The companion volume to La Porte Etroite . In the first book, Gide looks at what happens when someone allows themselves to become obsessed with the idea of God, to the exclusion of all normal human feelings. In this one, he shows what happens when you go to the other extreme and abandon moral values altogether. Taken as a pair, which is what he intended, I thought they were very good.

Название "Имморалист" сулит почти де Сада, т.е. уверенного в своей правоте, упертого человека, отрицающего ценности общества и знающего, почему и зачем он это делает. Ожидания оказались завышены. Герой "Имморалиста" Мишель - типичный герой, это интеллигент-нытик,лишний человек, которого беспокоит собственная никчемность и неудовлетворенные сексуальные желания. Он прикрывает жажду трахать арабских мальчиков длинными пассажами о любви к жене, и слово "любовь" употребляется так часто, что рябит в г More...

The Immoralist would have been a more spectacular book in another age, but in a Western world where homosexuality has all but won total legitimacy, Gide's selfish and halting discovery and acceptance of his own homosexuality comes across as stilted and perfunctory. I suspect the English translation did it no favors, but I found the language quite ordinary and the story told mechanical and straightforward. As such, this was not a very satisfying book.

Pity poor Marceline, whose ultimate death seem More...

أدب أندريه جيد هو حياته .. يحكي يومياته ، معاناته ، رحلاته في شمال أفريقيا وإيطاليا وسويسرا .. في تفاصيل تتجلى فيها الرعاية والحب مع زوجته .
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كل البهجة تنتظرنا دومًا ، لكنها تريد أن تجد العش الخاوي ، أن تكون وحيدة ، وأن تصل إلينا كأنها أمل .
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