The Counterfeiters (Penguin Modern Classics)
An experimental novel inspired by a counterfeit-coin scandal and a teenage suicide. Built around Edouard's notebook, it follows a web of young friendships, desire, and the unstable boundary between truth and falsehood.
Work Information
Where truth and falsehood exchange places, the novel begins to question itself.
Starting from a counterfeit-coin scandal and a teenage suicide, Gide layers Edouard's notebook, ideas about the novel, and the relationships among young people. Looking beyond the story itself, he expands what the modern novel can do.
Review Summaries
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Readers often praise the bold structure and shifting viewpoints, which make the novel compelling as a study of psychology and tangled relationships. At the same time, its large cast and demanding design can make it a challenging read.
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The novel is often valued for its intelligence and experimental form, especially its self-referential design and its focus on moral uncertainty. Some readers also feel it asks for patience, making it a book that rewards effort.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- 1990-07-26
- Pages
- 352 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780140180930
- ISBN-10
- 0140180931
- Price
- 2988 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Classics
'It's only after our death that we shall really be able to hear' The measured tone of hopeless nihilism that pervades The Counterfeiters quickly shatters any image of André Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter-century of intellectuals. In sharp and brilliant prose a seedy, cynical and gratuitously alarming narrative is developed, involving a wide range of otherwise harmless and mainly middle-to-upper-class Parisians. But the setting could be anywhere. From puberty through adolescence to death, The Counterfeiters is a rare encyclopedia of human disorder, weakness and despair.
Reviews
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A fine translation of this modernist masterpiece
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The language is wooden, maybe from a bad translation. The "hero" or "anti-hero" is pompous and uninteresting. The story does not seem real-life, maybe because of the translation as well as the era and class in which it is set. Most of the characters are unbelievable, you can see the workings of the author as he writes about them. I got to page 55 and decided I had better things to do with my time.