Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #327880 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-01
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 247 pages

Customer Reviews

Evocative mystery full of nostalgia
Sometimes you will read a book that is so good it will leave an impression that will remain with you long after you have finished the last page. Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes is one such book.
Set around the turn of the last century, this story is part romance, part mystery and part a nostalgic evocation of youth and centres around the story of Meaulnes who stumbles upon a party held within an enchanting chateau that neither the hero nor the narrator are able to find again.It is at this party that Meaulnes meets a girl who, whilst beguiling him, remains as elusive as the chateau. All these events take place within the mysterious countryside of The Berry in France, an area readers of Gillian Tindells' excellent "Celestine" will be very familiar with and will know as having the same ambience as such remote parts of England as Dartmoor.
Having read many translations of French literature, there is no other book that so beautifully captures village life and childhood as this book. The book is full of nostalgia and paints a vivd picture of everyday life in a small village, particularly it's school. Tragically, the author was killed in action during 1914, one year after "Le Grand Meaulnes" was published and, unfortunately,remained the only book that he wrote. It very much captures the tragedy of that generation, rather like Housman's "Shropshire Lad" poems do in English literature.
"Le Grand Meaulnes" is one of my favourite books of all time and I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-crafted and poetic read. An absolute classic.

Mysterious, enchanting, magical.
Le Grand Meulnes is the larger-than-life school boy who falls in love with a girl from a strange "domain". He spends much of the book trying to get back to this place. The story is an odd mixture of realism and fantasy. You are never quite sure whether the fantastic elements are simply the results of the school boys yearning imagination. In the end it is the narrator, the friend of le grand Meulnes, who haunted me. He is so ordinary and boring that he makes le grand Meulnes seem even more impossible and glamourous. And yet it is the narrator who we all probably most resemble. Perhaps with flashes of Meulnes if we are lucky. John Fowles descibed "Le Grand Meulnes" as a novel that "has haunted the european mind since it first appeared in 1913. It is a novel one never quite forgets, a book like a secret garden..." .

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Once in a blue moon you'll read a book and it hurts! It hurts because you realise that you can never ever read that book again for the first time! It is almost like finding out how a magic trick is done. this is one of those books. It has that special factor which so few books have. I will forever be caught up in the nostalgia created by this wonderful book and will always think back with fond memories to the time i read it first and look forawrd to reading it many more times. The loss of this brilliant author is equal to the loss of Meaulnes's lost domain!