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Sylvie

Gérard de Nerval

3.62 · Rating details · 888 ratings · 58 reviews

The story is about a hero's love for three women, all of whom he loses; a hymn to unattainable, unrequited love. The story begins when a paragraph in a newspaper plunges the narrator into his memories as a younger man. The perspective seems to shift back and forth between the past and present, so the reader is never entirely sure if the narrator is recounting past events ...more

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Mass Market Paperback, 95 pages

Published September 12th 2001 by Fayard (first published 1853)

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Jun 07, 2018 AGamarra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: clásicos, francia

"¡Amor, ay, por las formas vafas, por los tintes azules y rosados, por los fantasmas metafísicos! Vista de cerca, la mujer real sublevaba nuestra ingenuidad. Tenía que aparecer a nuestros ojos como una diosa o una reina, y desde luego, por nuestra parte, no pretender jamás acercarse a ella."

Me quedé muy sorprendido por esta obra de Nerval que aunque es desordenada, como el mismo autor lo admite, y cuenta algunos eventos comunes (me hizo recordar la "Graziella" de Lamartine), tiene elementos tan "¡Amor, ay, por las formas vafas, por los tintes azules y rosados, por los fantasmas metafísicos! Vista de cerca, la mujer real sublevaba nuestra ingenuidad. Tenía que aparecer a nuestros ojos como una diosa o una reina, y desde luego, por nuestra parte, no pretender jamás acercarse a ella."

Me quedé muy sorprendido por esta obra de Nerval que aunque es desordenada, como el mismo autor lo admite, y cuenta algunos eventos comunes (me hizo recordar la "Graziella" de Lamartine), tiene elementos tan genuinos y especiales que a la postre vendrían a ser reivindicados por el movimiento surrealista.
Cuenta la historia de amor o enamoramiento no muy bien descrito ni asumido del autor en su juventud. En la vida real el autor pasó momentos de su juventud educado por su tío en la campiña de Valois, territorio donde abundaban campesinos y la vida era más tranquila que en la capital París que posteriormente él habitó. De sus recuerdos sin duda nació este relato como comento, poco ordenado, asimétrico en gran parte (siempre a veces es una lástima cuando los relatos son cortos) pero impregnado de muchos estilos y recursos a la vez. Por momentos parece una poesía (género que el autor dominó muy bien), por momentos parecía que uno mismo perdía la noción del tiempo y del espacio en el cual transcurría la historia por sus descripciones no sólo románticas sino de algún modo oníricas, que hacían parecer todo como un ensueño (también experimentado por el propio autor), al hablarnos de lo que significaba para él las mujeres que conoció, las fiestas campesinas, las canciones románticas, el paseo en los bosques y un largo etcétera. Eso es lo que más me gustó y sorprendió, tal vez leyendo más obras del autor cambie la puntuación pero por lo menos al ser éste el primer texto en prosa que leo he quedado sorprendido por la gran versatilidad y variedad de recursos y relatos. Por otros momentos Nerval toma el relato simple, con diálogos y descripciones del momento propio que pasan los protagonistas y así es un relato asimétrico pero que encanta. Tengo que resaltar, pues fue de mi gusto, las continuas referencias a Rousseau, su "Nueva Eloísa" (que he tenido el placer de leerla in extenso) como gran maestro del alma y muchas otras reflexiones eruditas que hacen la obra más productiva.
El argumento en sí de la historia no me maravilló mas bien tanto. ...more

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Mar 07, 2013 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: short-stories

"I went to bed but found no rest; and as I lay there between sleeping and waking, memories of my childhood thronged about me. In this state, where the mind still resists the fantastic combinations of dreams, the important happenings of a long period of one’s life often crowd themselves into a few moments."

Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie seems to me a woefully overlook French nouvelle. It was first published in 1853, meaning that it is far out of copyright - and so anyone intrigued by this review, I

"I went to bed but found no rest; and as I lay there between sleeping and waking, memories of my childhood thronged about me. In this state, where the mind still resists the fantastic combinations of dreams, the important happenings of a long period of one’s life often crowd themselves into a few moments."

Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie seems to me a woefully overlook French nouvelle. It was first published in 1853, meaning that it is far out of copyright - and so anyone intrigued by this review, I recommend to read the English translation here. The story was a favorite of Marcel Proust, and the parallel themes of memory, time, love and jealousy are poignant in Sylvie, though in much smaller doses than in Proust's epic. A review this now, in the midst of "2013 - the Year in Reading Proust" in the hope that someone will discover this opalescent curio of literature, and that it will add even a small light to their experience of Proust.

Nerval's Sylvie is a brief tale of love lost, lost given-up, love forgone, but ultimately, unrequited love - and significantly self-delusion. Our lover turned narrator is a man with ideals, not moral ideals - no, he is a bit of a rake, though a passionate and romantic one, but rather aesthetic ideals, particularly as they pertain to love and romance. His memories are honeyed with these ideals, and are presented to use under the honeyed patina of nostalgia. If "distance makes the heart grow fonder," then distance in time captures the heart completely, the loves of his past are vouchsafed and solipsized so deep in the narrator's heart and memory that they are diminished to tiny gold phantoms of his self-styled illusions. His blending of dream, reality, and memory is something of which he warns us often: "As I set down these words I cannot help wondering whether the events they describe actually took place or whether I have dreamed them." And isn't memory something like a dream? Something like rêverie? In memory, in a moment, we are transported somewhere else in time, in place; sights, smells, emotions, and sensations return to us slightly altered - we are dually aware in memory, we have two "selves" - the minor self, the actor of our memory, and the major self, our current self who is the critic watching intently from behind the proscenium. So at one and the same time, it is reality, as it was or appeared to be at the time to our minor self, and dream or reality as a performance (as it seems in retrospect) to our major self. This is a central obfuscation of the nouvelle's narration - dream, delusion, or reality? The remembrance of things as they were, or the appearance of things then as they appear now?

The drama of the story is the narrator's return to Loisy, where his childhood visions were borne. He is newly rich by an inheritance, and has been pursuing with ardor a pretty young Parisian actress named Aurelia. However, when sleep is withheld from him by a "half-dreamed memory," he resolves to return to the sanctuary of his childhood loves, Syvlie (and also Adrienne, a young girl he loved but who was sent to a convent). We find in Sylvie the class-founded ideal of the "peasant girl," and idyllic kind of romantic ideal which is completely divorced from the reality of the person. When the narrator returns to her, he finds her engaged and also, more painful to him, that she has risen in class. Sylvie makes gloves for a living, and as a result has risen in social status beyond the precipice of peasanthood, into something like the working class (the sandwich filling between petit bourgeoisie and serfdom). He is heartbroken to find her so much changed (though for herself, she has changed for the better) - any change to his ossified ideal image of the past is a blemish to the immutable perfection of the past. When he asks her to sing a peasant song from their shared memory, she responds that "one doesn't sing that song anymore." he is heartbroken, and when asked why so, he responds "Because I love those old melodies and because you will forget how to sing them." This is the height of the narrator's disillusionment, she refuses to sing the little melody and thus shatters the memorialized ideal of his rural love. There is a tangible sense of regret, not for loving her, but for returning to her. As Flaubert warns in Madame Bovary: "Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." He sets off in his return to Paris, gilding on his fingers and a smudged idol, fallen from its erstwhile tabernacle.

The true beauty of this work, is not simply the confusion of memory, not simply the treatment of loves and ideals, but the blending of the two into a sort of self-delusion for the narrator. While Sylvie remains unattainable, and so far changed, undesired as her present self, and Aurelia remains coyly distant, Adrienne approaches apotheosis as the ideal which the narrator feels unites his loves, surpasses his loves. His love turned nun remains the unattainable ideal of his youth and increasingly his present, as other ideals fall by the way. The narrator even insists on Aurelia's likeness to Adrienne, and brings Sylvie to the Parisian theatre in order to confirm this likeness (does he doubt his own eyes? Does he fear they delude him?). He brings Aurelia to the place where he had previously fallen in love with Adrienne, but is dismayed that she is not struck by her surroundings as he is:

These places, full of precious memories for me, awakened only a mild interest in Aurelia, and even when I took her to the green lawn in front of the château near Orry, where I had first seen Adrienne, she was unmoved. So I told her how my love had been awakened by that slender figure bathed in mist and moonlight, and how, since then, that love had lived only in my dreams, now to be realized in her. She was gravely attentive, and when I had finished speaking she said, ‘You don’t love me at all! You’re only waiting for me to tell you that the actress and the nun are the same person. All you want is a drama, and the climax evades you. I’ve lost my faith in you completely!’

Aurelia pinpoints the internal conflict of the narrator, and I turn to Proust for his explanation of the phenomenon, which far surpasses my own ability:

Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, ... and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring...

The narrator has imbued all of his love's value on the three women of his past and present, and as their ideals begin to show signs of fatigue, their individual values, their individual perfections and beauties, rather than diminishing in number, they are grafted upon the loves which the narrator feels remain to him: simply Aurelia. And we can see this double-grafting of Sylvie and Adrienne in his description of her on the day of the preciously mentioned confrontation: "Dressed in her riding-habit, and with her hair streaming out in the wind, Aurelia rode through the wood like a queen of bygone days, to the great bewilderment of the peasantry." The remaining "queen of bygone days" is Adrienne, as she rides through the sacred ground of the narrator's and Adrienne's tryst, and the reference to peasantry is an allusion to his idealized love for Sylvie. None of his loves can ever come to fruition because he does not love any of them wholly, but loves small aspects of them, even small illusions or romantic stereotypes of them, and never gets at them completely, never digs deep into himself to discover what he loves, he loves only on the surface. But in the end it is inconsequential whether he remembers these women exactly, whether he conflates them, or makes them up, because they are not real and he does not really love any of them, but rather loves a phantasmic ideal which glows blindingly behind them: making them mere shadows, silhouettes on the edifice of his passionate desires. ...more

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May 16, 2019 Oziel Bispo rated it really liked it

O narrador- personagem vivendo em uma ilusão que beira à loucura , não consegue se decidir entres essas beldades : Aurélie, Sylvie e Adrienne. Mas será que ele na verdade prefere este estado ilusório ou é apenas um escape para uma realidade intangível? Teremos que ler o livro para saber. O que percebemos , é que a mente do narrador está toda confusa; Aurelie para ele é apenas uma manifestação presente de seu amor que sentira no passado por Adrienne, e Sylvie é apenas uma encarnação de Adrienne a ...more

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Sep 19, 2016 Jose Moa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This short novel is for me a little forgotten jewel of the romantic literature,has a exquisite,elegant,cult and with many references to the classic world prose.

It is a simbol in the form of the memories of a man of the fruitless search of the idealistic sublimated romantic love represented by three differet women.

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Sep 28, 2017 Silvery rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017-reads, french-classics

Umberto Eco, «uno de los libros más bellos jamás escritos.» «La lectura de Sylvie me dejó trastornado. Más tarde supe que a Proust le había sucedido lo mismo.» Umberto Eco

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Jun 12, 2011 Lily rated it did not like it

Shelves: french

Hated it. I am NOT a romantic, I guess. Or sorry, a Romantic. Romantique. This class (Rebellion Against Romanticism) was such a labor for me. God bless the professor, but I just couldn't find it in me to get excited about melodramatic, borderline-suicidal male protagonists who loved nature and women and suffering. Sylvie was all about the difference between this innocent naive country girl and this actress, both of whom totally capture the narrator's heart. He really goes off the deep end, and ...more

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Dec 18, 2017 Carlos rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Dice Juan Malpartida: “Traductor, poeta, narrador, cuentista, libretista, Gérard de Nerval fue un escritor raro para su tiempo. Su obra más profunda e inquietante fue escrita en los últimos años de su vida como un testimonio de su particular descenso a los infiernos. Amigo y colaborador de Gautier, de Alejandro Dumas, de Victor Hugo, Nerval fue admirado por ellos, pero la rareza de su propósito literario y la rara calidad de su prosa y de su poesía sólo podían ser comprendidas a partir de ...more

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Jan 01, 2016 Laura marked it as to-read

Shelves: e-books, fiction-19th-century, french-literature, novellas, gutenberg

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

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Mar 10, 2019 Jerry rated it liked it · review of another edition

A diferencia de Proust o Eco, no me ha parecido una obra maestra ni una joya de la literatura romántica del XIX. Eso sí, me ha parecido un cuento bonito, con un gusto por la palabra muy cuidado y, aunque breve, con cierta profundidad emocional.

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Feb 03, 2019 Simona rated it liked it

Due testi in uno potrebbe essere descritto così questo breve romanzo di Gerard de Nerval. Da un lato, il racconto di Sylvie e dall' altro la rilettura di Eco che lo ha anche tradotto per Einaudi.
La rilettura di Eco impreziosisce ancora di più Sylvie permettendo al lettore di comprendere significati che possono sfuggire.
Sylvie è come una di queste chimere che "ammaliano e sconvolgono all'alba della vita", inafferrabile che ti trasporta tra sogno e realtà, dove non si sa quando inizia uno e ...more

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Jun 17, 2017 Micha rated it did not like it

Shelves: 19th-century

Umberto Eco went on and on about this in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods and elsewhere I'm sure, so I thought I ought to read it. It sounded exceptional, elusive, playing with time and memory, with elements of Romanticism and lost beauty and all the other things that you can name to gain my immediate attention. As ever, I don't know if the problem is in the translation, though I looked at two side-by-side in the library before making my impulsive choice, but part of the problem was that I just ...more

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Apr 17, 2016 Francesca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Che dire ora, che non sia la storia di tanti altri?
[…] Tali sono le chimere che ammaliano e sconvolgono all'alba della vita […] Le illusioni cadono l'una dopo l'altra, come scorze di un frutto, e il frutto è l'esperienza. Il suo sapore è amaro e tuttavia essa ha qualcosa di aspro che tonifica. […]

La storia è più o meno tutta qui, racchiusa in queste poche righe.
'Ecco dov'era la felicità... eppure.'
Già, capita. Mentre tu non scegli, gli altri lo fanno, eccome se lo fanno!, e definiscono la tua ...more

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Dec 13, 2010 Brent rated it really liked it

Shelves: classics

I immediately reread large sections of this story when I finished it just to try to understand how Nerval achieved the effects that have made this story famous. The temporal ambiguity, the merging of themes and characters, the eerie crisscrossing of biography and fantasy...reading this book was like floating through Nerval's memory. And it was a weird, wonderful experience.

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Dec 05, 2014 Andy rated it liked it

Nostalgie!

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Mar 11, 2019 Palimp rated it really liked it

Escrito con una prosa delicada y poética, con una estructura narrativa bastante moderna y libre, deja muy buen sabor de boca.

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Apr 05, 2015 AraBD rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015

La pérdida de dos amores, uno por idealizar otro. ¿Vivir de recuerdos, es vivir?

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Mar 28, 2017 Vatroslav Herceg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Alfa
Zagreb, 2007.
S francuskog prevela: Višnja Machiedo
Djelo je objelodanjeno u sklopu biblioteke "Vrhovi svjetske književnosti". Unutar samog izdanja objavljena su još dva naslova, koja? Vidjet ćete ako pročitate moja sljedeća dva kratkosvrta. Prevoditeljica Višnja Machiedo je ujedno napisala i pogovor.
Izvorno izdanje je tiskano 1853. te u tom smislu valja istaći da je, od svih zapadnoeuropskih nacionalnih romantičarskih poetika, francuski romantizam ponajviše kasnio. Romantizam je započeo svoj Alfa
Zagreb, 2007.
S francuskog prevela: Višnja Machiedo
Djelo je objelodanjeno u sklopu biblioteke "Vrhovi svjetske književnosti". Unutar samog izdanja objavljena su još dva naslova, koja? Vidjet ćete ako pročitate moja sljedeća dva kratkosvrta. Prevoditeljica Višnja Machiedo je ujedno napisala i pogovor.
Izvorno izdanje je tiskano 1853. te u tom smislu valja istaći da je, od svih zapadnoeuropskih nacionalnih romantičarskih poetika, francuski romantizam ponajviše kasnio. Romantizam je započeo svoj šišmišji let oko 1770-ih, "The Castle of Otranto" je objavljen još prije, 1764., vrhunac mjesečine romantizma se odigrao u 1790-ima pa je francuska kultura uistinu zakasnila. Uzrok tome je činjenica da je Prva Republika, ali i Napoleonovo carstvo, slavilo klasicizam kao odsjaj antičke kulture i antičkog republikanstva.
Jezik je doista ukusan, pisan je u old skul điru, izarazito je raskošan. Zanimljiv mi je bio sljedeći izraz; "Prelazi se preko vlažnih livada po kojima zmijulje potoci".
Stil pisanja je tipičan za prozu francuskog romantizma, podsjeća na Chateaubrianda, no također podsjeća i na Novalisov roman "Naučnici iz Saisa". Bacit ću ovaj citat da se stekne pravi dojam;

"... ubrzo se zaputih jednom dubokom stazom koja se proteže duž šume Ermenonvillea; očekivao sam potom da ću naići na zidove jednog samostana, što ih je valjalo slijediti tijekom četvrtine jedne milje. Mjesec se s vremena na vrijeme skrivao pod oblake, jedva osvjetljavajući stijene od tamnog pješčanog kamena i vrijesak koji se umnožavao pod mojim koracima. Zdesna i slijeva, ivice šuma bez održavanih putova, a ispred mene svagda one druidske stijene tamošnjeg kraja, što čuvaju uspomene na Armenove sinove koje su istrijebili Rimljani! S vrha tih uzvišenih naslaga kamenja vidjeh kako se udaljena jezera ističu poput zrcala izrezanih iz maglene ravnice, a da ne uzmogoh razlučiti od ostalih jezero na kojemu se održavala svetkovina".
Cjelokupnu radnju prenosi homodijegestski pripovjedač koji je ujedno i središnji lik. Ovu lirsku, prozu karakterizira flaneurština, česte su šetnje po šumovitim predjelima Francuske, te introspekcije, sjećanja, asocijacije na tri žene koje su obilježile emocionalni život lika naratora. Kroz tekst diše mirnoća, spokoj, uravnoteženost, osjećajnost, melankolija.
Učestala je referenca na Rousseauovu "Novu Heloisu", referenca se ostvaruje na način da sami likovi pričaju o tom djelu.
Baš je kul ovaj kratki roman.
Pozdrav svim Ilirima! I Ilirkama! I transrodnim građanima naše Ilirije!
...more

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Jan 01, 2018 Estado Lector rated it liked it

Sylvie es una novela corta, su protagonista vive recordando tiempos pasados y lamentandose por los amores que no lograron ser, sus descripciones poéticas quieren mostrarnos la belleza de los pueblos italianos de siglos pasados y su desenlace es penoso y nostálgico.

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Mar 09, 2018 Anthony Gunderson rated it really liked it

Poor Gerard. Epigone of Goethe? Perhaps. Heir to Rousseau. This Gallic writer ( Nerval, not me) seems to mention Camille Paglia's least favorite philosopher. But I digress.
The novel is ostensibly a tale of unrequited love. For a provincial girl, an actress, and a nun. The nameless narrator is in love with all three. But is he? I think he's in love with the idea of love. What a lovely idea. The novella progresses in a nonlinear format from a theatre in Paris to the Alps. What will capture the ...more

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Feb 27, 2017 Liliana Méndez rated it really liked it

Es una bonita historia, y en lo personal me encanto en modo en el cual estaba narrada la historia, a pesar que un par de veces me perdí, ya que fue más interesante.
En cuanto a los personajes tengo que decir que más de una vez Sylvie me desespero, y nuestro protagonista misterioso me llegó al corazon, aún así no le perdono lo que llego a hacer...
Realmente vale la pena darle la oportunidad para sorprendernos, lo que sí recomiendo es no llegar con expectativas pero sí informados, a éste ni a ...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Akeyla Pratt rated it really liked it

This was a very good example of a French nouvelle... in equal parts romantic and tragic. My only criticism is that it was sometimes hard to tell when Nerval was writing a memory and when he was actually writing the events taking place in the timeline of the story. It wasn't always immediately clear to me when he would drift off into a story taken from one of the narrator's memories.

Apart from that, though, it was a lovely and fairly quick read.

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Aug 15, 2013 Imane rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

Cela résume ce que je pense de ce livre horrible !

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Oct 04, 2018 mohammad rated it it was amazing

عشق،ای دریغا از آن! از پیکرههایی مبهم و مه آلوده، رنگهایی گلفام و کبود،شبحهایی فراسویی و آنسری! اگر از نزدیک مینگریستیم، زن راستین و واقعی ما را، به سبب ساده دلیمان، بر میشوراند؛ میبایست که زن، چونان شهربانو یا ایزدبانو پدیدار میشد، تا دل از ما برباید؛ و به ویژه میبایست به او نزدیک نمی شدیم.
#سیلوی
#ژرار دو نروال
#میر جلال الدین کزازی ...more

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Jul 27, 2014 Francesco D'Isa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: very-short-reviews

People from different worlds want to reconnect: the protagonist falls in love with a dream, is loved by an idea and he will be abandoned by both. The best non-suicide note ever written.

Plot: He loves Adrienne, Sylvie loves him, but soon no one will love him.

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Jul 01, 2010 l. rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, novel-novella, poetry, french-belgian-lit

I liked Sylvie, which is what got the 4 star rating. As to the others... I feel Aurealia was an undirected account, which while it wasn't as tiresome as it could have been, was not really .... my thing.

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Feb 07, 2017 MauroMC rated it liked it

Nice short novel about missed opportunities. The narrator is showing what it could have been, but it was not. I would have liked to know also a little more about other characters of the story, for example Adrienne or the theater girl.
At the end it was a good read, but it could have been better.

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Dec 06, 2012 Dene rated it really liked it

wonderful use of time - poignant present or is melancholy recollected - not always certain which is core to the beauty and feeling this story creates.

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