Recommendations
Books Like Les Caves du Vatican by André Gide
Books for readers who loved Lafcadio's gratuitous act and Gide's satirical comedy
Les Caves du Vatican (1914) is the funniest and most subversive of Gide's major works — a criminal confidence scheme, an impossibly complicated family tree, and a young man who pushes a stranger from a train for no reason whatsoever. These 8 books share its delight in gratuitous action, its satirical view of Catholic piety, and its portrait of a character who acts purely for the sake of acting.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLes Faux-Monnayeurs
by André Gide
Gide's only true novel and his most complex work — a self-reflexive book about counterfeit money, counterfeit lives, and a novelist who is writing the same novel we are reading; shares Les Caves's interest in the performance of identity.
- 2
Buy on AmazonL'Étranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's unmotivated shooting on the beach is the direct descendant of Lafcadio's unmotivated push — both are studies in action without conventional motive, though Camus makes the consequence far heavier.
- 3
Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The classic French philosophical satire — a young man of exaggerated innocence moves through a catastrophically absurd world, which is the comic mode that Gide inherited and updated in Les Caves.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's great family novel is one of the texts Gide knew most intimately — the question of whether one can commit a crime in complete freedom, disconnected from motive and consequence, is raised by Ivan Karamazov in exactly the way Lafcadio acts on it.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Confidence-Man
by Herman Melville
A shapeshifting con man moves through a Mississippi riverboat on April Fools' Day — the American precursor to Les Caves's criminal scheme, with the same interest in masks, imposture, and the credulity of the pious.
- 6
Buy on AmazonJacques the Fatalist
by Denis Diderot
Diderot's digressive, self-interrupting novel about a servant and his master is the eighteenth-century French model for the satirical mode that Gide uses — playful, philosophical, and delighted by its own contrivance.
- 7
Buy on AmazonPale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's commentary on a dead poet's poem by a self-deluding critic is the modern masterpiece of the same mode — elaborate artifice in the service of a character who is both ridiculous and strangely sympathetic.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
An anarchist physicist moves between two worlds, one of collective ownership and one of capitalism — a different register entirely, but Le Guin's interest in what it means to act freely without the scaffolding of society resonates with Lafcadio's experiment.
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