Recommendations
Books Like Les Faux-Monnayeurs by André Gide
Gide's only 'roman' — the self-reflexive novel where a novelist writes the same novel
Gide's 1925 masterpiece — the only work he called a roman, where novelist Édouard is writing a book called Les Faux-Monnayeurs; multiple perspectives, homosexuality treated as unremarkable, a boys' school scandal with counterfeit coins.
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Buy on AmazonL'Immoraliste
by André Gide
Gide's first major récit (1902) — the story of Michel's discovery of freedom in North Africa at the cost of his wife's life; reading this alongside Les Faux-Monnayeurs gives the full range of Gide's treatment of the conflict between authenticity and convention.
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Buy on AmazonLa Porte étroite
by André Gide
The counter-récit to L'Immoraliste (1909) — Alissa's self-renunciation as the form authenticity takes in the Protestant tradition; the two short novels together give the moral range from which Les Faux-Monnayeurs departs.
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Buy on AmazonSi le grain ne meurt
by André Gide
The autobiography published the same year as Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926) — Gide's account of his Protestant upbringing, his discovery of North Africa, and his homosexuality; reading it alongside the novel makes the autobiographical dimensions explicit.
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Buy on AmazonLe Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs
by André Gide
The compositional journal (1926) — Gide's own notes on how he wrote Les Faux-Monnayeurs; one of the most extraordinary documents in French literary history, creating a metaliterary situation without parallel: a novel about a novelist who cannot write a novel, with the actual writer's notes on how he did.
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Buy on AmazonLes Enfants terribles
by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau's 1929 novel of adolescent life sealed off from adult understanding — the closest parallel to the school world of Les Faux-Monnayeurs in interwar French fiction, though Cocteau's treatment is more mythological and Gide's more sociological.
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The Counterfeiters (Dorothy Bussy translation)
by André Gide
The standard English translation (Knopf, 1927) by Dorothy Bussy — reading the translation alongside the French gives the best sense of how Gide's precision operates, since the places where Bussy struggles are the places where the French is most exactly controlled.
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Buy on AmazonÀ la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust
The contemporary French masterwork of the same decade — reading Proust and Gide together gives the range of what the French novel could do in the 1910s–1920s; both are engaged with homosexuality, both with the relationship between consciousness and time, but in completely different forms.
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Buy on AmazonThe Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
The German parallel — Mann's 1924 novel of young Hans Castorp sealed off from ordinary life in a Swiss sanatorium, where ideas and desire compete; Les Faux-Monnayeurs and The Magic Mountain are the two great European novels of 1924–1925 that take the crisis of liberal values as their subject.
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