A museum piece. Not one of those that draws the crowds, either; more of a worthy but kind of dull, really, Velazquez.

A companion to Gide's [b:Strait is the Gate|469406|Strait is the Gate (La Porte Etroite)|André Gide|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347378560s/469406.jpg|702632], in which he explores the dangers of over-religiosity, in The Immoralist he explores the dangers of rejecting the conventional moral life and trying to live for immediate aesthetic and sensual pleasures. Well, kind of. The life Michel leads here is still fairly conventional, even edging on moral, despite his lofty rhetoric otherwise. He just doesn't do much to impress the reader that he's in fact living out his stated aims and rejecting convention.

Which gets to what this story is perhaps really about: repressed homosexuality. I have to take issue with the book description where it states the book is "a frank defense of homosexuality". It is nothing of the kind. In regards to Michel's homosexuality, it is the opposite of frank. It is subtle enough that it apparently went almost totally unnoticed at the time of its publication. Furthermore it is not a defense; Michel is a mostly unsympathetic character, he treats his devoted (painfully so) wife rather appallingly, and as Gide writes in his preface to a later edition of the work, "If I had intended my hero as an example, it must be granted I did anything but succeed." Indeed, I can't imagine anyone thinking at the end of this story, "Man, that Michel, what a great guy."

It may be said this book is an illustration of the torments and harm that can come about through the individual repressing such an elementary, necessary part of him or herself. A repression that can be blamed on society's restrictive conception of what is proper and moral, to be sure. Even when the individual tries to live in a way more true to himself, it may still prove difficult.

The Immoralist may then be more a condemnation of narrow-minded society that produces tormented men like Michel, than of Michel's transgressive actions, or a defense of such a man produced by such a society.

Which all may make the book sound like an entertaining read, but I assure you, the ideas behind the book are more interesting than the book's execution. ( )

3.5 ( )

The start of this book is somewhat absurd:
Preface: I wrote this book, and offer it for what it's worth;
Letter: Dear brother, please find attached my account of visiting Michel in Tunisia;
Account of Tunisia: I'm writing to you from Tunisia, where it's sunny. Here's what Michel said;
What Michel said: The actual story.

The absurd thing about this is that all this framing adds nothing. Somehow it was necessary for the author to distance himself not just once, with a narrator, or twice with a narrator writing down someone's story, but three times with a narrator recounting how he previously wrote down someone's story. And then the author sticks a preface in front of it saying that his book tries to prove nothing, just in case you weren't distanced enough.

And, this is exactly how I feel about this book - distanced. There are a few passages where the story was allowed to unfold, but mostly Michel just described how tormented he was about how he thought and felt about things - getting sick, managing a farm, Parisian society, having a sick wife. I believe the value of a novel as opposed to a work of philosophy is to allow the reader to experience or observe behaviour and emotions, rather than simply be exposed to ideas. This novel does the latter and suffers for it.

I also found that although I know it was a different time, I found many of the choices made by Michel frustrating. He seems too willing to sacrifice others for his own fulfilment, regardless of whether it might be entirely necessary. Maybe at the time it was necessary to say "I must be free regardless of who I harm in doing so" but today I'm much more interested in the question of "How can I be free and allow others to live and be free as well?" Michel certainly doesn't entertain this question. ( )

While I was initially excited by the premise of the book, it was very slow paced. It ended up being more just slow ramblings of an old man and not important life lessons he learned or the friendships he made along the way. ( )

Reason Read: Reading 1001, randomizer pick for June 2023.
Written in 1902. French author, translated by David Watson, 2000
1947 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is a short work about a man named Michel who systematically ruins his life. A self absorbed person who is never content with life and has to find a way to move on. I am grateful that this is a short book. It is not my favorite. Rated it a C

I agree that the debauchery is handled tastefully which I appreciated. We the reader get the point. And it is about more than homosexuality it also includes pederasty. "As a self-professed pederast, he used his writing to explore his struggle to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without betraying one's values." I don't fully agree that the author kept himself out of the book, but in this book he did explore what happens when one betrays his values. ( )

La primera parte es perfecta ( )

Immoralist? I mean I guess if you define immorality as an rejoicing in ones descent into declasse from the petite bourgeois and its trappings of ennui. ( )

4/26/22

The story of a man who prefers the company of beautiful Arab boys and strapping peasant youth to that of his pious, tubercular wife was probably quite shocking when The Immoralist appeared in 1902. (The title allowed Gide to be provocative and to shield himself from public contempt at the same time). When a character tells the protagonist that most people are afraid to live their own authentic lives, we know he has hit upon one of the poignant truths of modernity. This is the kind of book that makes people think that literature has special powers. ( )

Bellíssima novel·la, però, sobretot, extraordinària traducció de Marta Bes i Oliva. En cap moment no teniu la impressió que vos perdeu res pel fet de no poder llegir l'original en francès. La traducció de Bes té una riquesa de lèxic i una sintaxi tan genuïna que avui ja no es troben, ja no hi estam acostumats. Mentre la llegiu, teniu la sensació que Bes ha fet la traducció pel pur plaer de traduir, més que per un encàrrec. N'hi ha molts que seguim escriptors. Hauríem de seguir aquesta traductora. ( )

Largely due to the passage of time and the evolution of public morals, this book is no longer the boundary breaking work it was on its publication in 1902. Still well written and interesting it no longer has the power to make it a memorable read. ( )

After recovering from an illness, a man decides to live his life without being held back by society's morals or conventions.

What must have been shocking when written seemed only mildly risque to me now.

The part I found the most odd was how his wife kept hanging out with local children and then bringing them home to entertain them. I read her intentions as pure (she likes children and does not have any of her own yet), but kept thinking WOW that would not happen today.

I enjoyed the writing style and the philosophical debates about life and how to live it. ( )

1001 Books begins its summary of The Immoralist like this:

A thought-provoking book that still has the power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, The Immoralist recounts a young Parisian man’s attempt to overcome social and sexual conformity

. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, ABC Books 2006, p.241)

The novella is prefaced by an attempt to explain that the ‘problem’ of the book existed before it was written. It is then book-ended at the beginning by a pseudo-letter to the Prime Minister that asks what role in society a young man like the hero might have… and completed by that same friend’s awkward conclusion after the hero’s story has been told. That story is narrated by Michel, who starts out as an austere young scholar and ends up as a defiant hedonist.

The translation, by Dorothy Bussy, uses the term ‘hero’ in the preface. But it does not seem to me that there is anything heroic about Michel.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/18/the-immoralist-by-andre-gide-translated-by-d... ( )

Well, I liked this more than I thought I would, and more than everyone else seems to. Gide's style here is glorious. Like Larbaud, the prose is perfectly clear, a little elegiac, but also as precise as possible. Gide's tale is simple, but thought-provoking: you could read this as a celebration of Nietzschean uber-menschdom, but only if you're more or less an inhuman prick; you could read it as a plea for repression and moralistic priggery, but only if, again, you're an inhuman prick. On the other hand, Gide makes a strong case for both: Michel is miserable as he is (i.e., repressed and oppressed), but also miserable as a completely 'free' immoralist. There's no particularly good answer here, but the novel is extremely well put together.

Also, fun form: a letter written by one friend to another friend recounting the story told in person to the writer by a mutual friend. It works surprisingly well. ( )

A hundred and ten odd years have turned this novel limp for modern readers. The questions about personal freedom and how to pursue it best have resolved themselves.
Nonetheless, a good quick read that casts light on its time.

This story of the Immoralist is narrated to a select group of his old friends, who come at the request of the epoymous protagonist to his self appointed place of exile in North Africa. They find him dejected and really out of sorts, and he explains the story of what led him to be here, which spans an interval of time over which they have largely lost touch with him. In the final pages, following his tale, one of them sums up their feelings, which capture the unease that is likely to take hold of the reader: ”Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices. We felt, as it were, involved.”
The story itself, without going into any detail of the plot, centres on the Frenchman Michel. After recovering from a life threatening illness that he discovers on his honeymoon, he becomes extra alert to the pleasures of his senses, and veers off onto a path of hedonism at the expense of his new wife. While no single action here is really shocking in itself, and seems understandable based on Michel's point of view, it is the sum total that become unsettling, and perhaps more so the attitude or thoughts of Michel that drive his behaviour. He becomes detatched in some way from the world and society, but not in the sense that the existentialists do - yet it produces a similar sense of unease. The difference is perhaps that existentialist unease in some cases is due to feeling at odds with, or sick due to the senses (Satre's Nausea), of sometimes too much moral self reflection (Kierkegaard), and alienation from others (Sartre again, and Camus), while in this case Michel slips into a world subject to the senses and detatched from moral self reflection. Having said that, though much of his enjoyment revolves around others, his superficial appreciation of them more as unknowable objects in some sense, does however share some aspects with existentialism.
This is a very distinctive work, and though the story in itself is not of the kind that makes a page-turner, it leaves a lasting impression due to the reasons above, and much of the atmosphere vividly described. It is also not at all difficult to read, and is somewhere between a novella and a novel in length at under 160 pages. Though it might be considered by some a classic due to there not being anything else quite like this, that I am aware of, I did not enjoy it as much as the novella length works by Camus or other French writers with whom Gide might be compared. ( )

Knowing a bit about Gide's biography makes Marceline make sense. A lot of the book is clarified in light of his biography, really. Another one that contributes to my current work, I must say that this book wasn't nearly as satisfying as I hoped. I was ready for more criminality and more immorality, though the oblique ways that Michel renounces morals is thought-provoking. I also dreadfully wanted more Menalque, which gives me more motivation to get to [b:Fruits of the Earth|869348|Fruits of the Earth|André Gide|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1338733205s/869348.jpg|1272045]. ( )

A story powerful in its subversiveness, one that gets under the reader's skin, touching the reader at their most vulnerable: it is a crash course in the non-normative sexual experience that is far ahead of its time. ( )

A story powerful in its subversiveness, one that gets under the reader's skin, touching the reader at their most vulnerable: it is a crash course in the non-normative sexual experience that is far ahead of its time. ( )

This was one of the first pieces of French literature that I read.

Gide's writing is very atmospheric and sensual (sensual as in it engages with your senses, and sensual as in sexy). The protagonist in this little book is not a very good person - newly married, he travels to Africa and, upon meeting some of the young men, begins to explore his sexuality.

I really liked this book. I like amoral characters, I like moral ambiguity, I like reading books about bad people doing questionable things. The only problem I believe I had with this book is that the female character in it feels a little bit arbitrary.

But the atmosphere is lovely, Gide uses metaphor really well and it makes for a hedonistic novel. c: ( )

The narrator is an absorbed, incompetent ass who gives tuberculosis to his wife, Marceline ( )

One of those books that I thought I had to read growing up, but was then somewhat disappointed with upon actually opening it. Perhaps because of the translation I read... ( )

After a brush with death, Michel looks for purpose in a life of indulgence. Chasing meaningful experiences he uncovers his latent homosexuality and is attracted by more unsavory characters. I liked the first part of the book, where Michel under the care of his wife rediscovers his zest of life and is attracted by youth and health in the form of the young boys that visit their home. I had a harder time understanding his escapades in the later chapters. ( )

I recently watched Anderson Cooper's segment on 60 Minutes about Mindfulness, which Wikipedia defines as "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment." Gide, who died in 1951, had never heard of Mindfulness. But you would have never known it.

Gide's descriptive writing is scaled back and simple to read. I don't think he intended to craft a suspenseful plot, nor a successful love story, nor especially a sympathetic protagonist. For me more than anything The Immoralist is Gide's meditation on, and exploration of, Mindfulness. Michel, his budding, pedophiliac protagonist (a double-adjectival term I've thus far created and designated for Humbert Humbert and Michel), slowly discovers his sickening inner life. But sometime after Michel thoughtlessly bought young Arab boys' company for a few sous, and sometime before he institutionalizes his favorites as part of his personal retainer, he came to accept what we now call Mindfulness, in which "the layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there."

I've never been one to complain about a healthy, wild, insight-ridden hedonistic romp. However, I didn't find Gide's burning introspection captivating enough to make up for his otherwise relatively sparse novel. Worthwhile to read, nonetheless. ( )

An odd book in some ways - it is almost entirely told as a first person narrative about a man Michel who almost dies and in his recovery, becomes "reborn" in a way but lost in another way. This novella doesn't feel dated (with the exception that it is now rare for people to contract tuberculosis), and perhaps the new translation has something to do with that...

I don't know if this is considered to be existentialist, but Michel goes from being a student of languages and history to someone primarily concerned with sensations and feelings of the present. For example, he says "I was not thinking about anything. Why bother to have thoughts? I felt extraordinarily good." and then later: "The history of the past now appeared to my eyes to be this immobile, terrifying fixity of the night shadows in the little court in Biskra. It was like the immobility of death. In the past I was pleased with this rigidity which provided precision for my mind."

For a while it seems like things will work out well, but once he and Marceline leave the farm in Normandy, things just go downhill. They lose their first baby, and then Marceline becomes ill. It seems like he becomes more and more lost as she becomes sicker and sicker. After her death, he finds "Something in my will has been broken." I see Marceline as being almost the physical manifestation of Michel's soul... ( )