Recommendations
Books Like Le Grand Meaulnes
Best books to read after Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
Alain-Fournier's only completed novel (1913) is one of the best-loved works in the French tradition — a lyrical story of adolescent enchantment, the accidental discovery of a magical estate, and the impossibility of recovering that world once it has been left behind. The most read French school novel of the twentieth century, it defined the tradition of the lost paradise in French fiction.
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Sylvie
by Gérard de Nerval
Nerval's 1853 novella is the most precise French predecessor in the tradition of the irrecoverable enchanted moment — the narrator's return to his childhood landscape and the woman he loved there is exactly the same gesture as Meaulnes's impossible attempt to return to the Domaine sans nom.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The most direct American parallel — Gatsby's impossible attempt to recover the past he shared with Daisy is the same gesture as Meaulnes's attempt to return to the estate and to Yvonne, and both novels are elegies for the impossibility of recovering a magical world once it has been left behind.
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Du côté de chez Swann
by Marcel Proust
Proust's first volume of À la recherche is the parallel French modernist treatment of the enchantment of childhood memory and its recovery — the madeleine episode and the world of Combray show how the same theme of the lost paradise that Le Grand Meaulnes treats lyrically can be treated philosophically.
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Brontë's novel of an impossible love tied to a place and a lost world is one of the most important predecessors in the tradition — Heathcliff's obsessive return to the moors and to Catherine parallels Meaulnes's obsessive return to the estate and to Yvonne, in a much darker register.
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The Go-Between
by L.P. Hartley
Hartley's English parallel — the middle-aged narrator who returns to the memory of a summer when he served as go-between for a doomed love affair shows the same structure of the adult looking back at an enchanted adolescent moment that defined his emotional life.
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Rêverie du promeneur solitaire
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau's late meditations on solitude and the irretrievability of happiness are the philosophical predecessor for the tradition of the irrecoverable enchanted moment that Le Grand Meaulnes develops in narrative form.
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L'Île aux esclaves
by Pierre Marivaux
Marivaux's theatrical tradition of the enchanted alternative world where normal social relations are suspended — the theatrical tradition Le Grand Meaulnes inherits in its portrait of the mysterious estate where a child's wedding feast is prepared.
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Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life
by Robert Gibson
Gibson's biography of Alain-Fournier — killed in action in September 1914, only one month after the novel appeared — is the essential companion for understanding the relationship between the novel and the autobiographical sources in Alain-Fournier's own experience of the lost paradise.
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