Strait is the Gate by Andre Gid��, translated by Dorothy ...

Strait is the Gate by Andre Gid��, translated by Dorothy Bussy

Vintage 1956 (originally published in 1909)

 

I found this slim book among my paperbacks and realized I have no memory of ever reading Gide, so I began it at once.  Strait is the Gate is a very simple story set in France in the 1880s, of two cousins, Alissa and Jerome, who fall in love as children and, although their love and devotion only deepen as they age, are unable to marry.  It is Alissa who constantly demurs:  she thinks she is too old for Jerome; she want her younger sister, Juliette (who also loves Jerome) to marry first.  And then it is slowly revealed that her desire to love God somehow prohibits her from loving Jerome; she feels that marrying him would prevent him from fully loving God, and so  inspired by a sense of  perverted piety, she toys with him for several years before finally rejecting him and dying from what appears to be heartbreak.

Jerome narrates the first two-thirds of the book; the final third is comprised of Alissa's journals, which she bequeaths him and which explain her mysterious behavior, and a coda in which Jerome meets Juliette many years later.  He confesses he is still in love with Alissa and will never marry, never love anyone else.

The book is elegantly composed and written, but its central concerns of Alissa's romantic/theological dilemma did not make much sense or interest me.  And Jerome's apathy and blindness--his continued misguided and unfounded devotion to Alissa only makes the book that much more impotent, unable to deeply move or engage the reader (me).