The Counterfeiters.

I can’t say that I fully got the point of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (#60, Novel 100). It’s interesting in a way as an early attempt at what we would now call metafiction, with mentions of a novel within the novel, and with the fictional author’s journals providing large chunks of the real novel’s narrative. But the story itself never grabbed me.

The novel’s overarching theme seems to be the decline of morality in post-World War I France, although how Gide could kvetch about morality is beyond me. The story lacks a single focus – Gide himself said his story was more like an ellipse, with two foci, than a circle with a single center – but generally revolves around Bernard Profitendieu, the illegitimate son of a judge who sets off on a search for identity, and Edouard, the frustrated novelist inside the book who ends up connected with Bernard through his own nephew Olivier, and who opens the door into a second plot revolving around a depressed old man who wants his grandson retrieved from his home in Poland. Neither of the storylines is particularly interesting, and the most interesting one, around the dissolute young boys who pass counterfeit coins (giving the novel its title), is given very short shrift until a sudden climax at the novel’s very end.

One thing that kept occurring to me is that Gide, generally classified as a homosexual but perhaps better described as a pederast, had little grasp of adult romantic relationships, especially those between men and women. Nearly every interaction among the various heterosexual couples or pairs in the book rang false for me, while the allusions to gay couplings mostly went over my head, except for the few times Edouard was a little less coy about his liaisons. Gide’s discomfort or unfamiliarity with normal adult relations kept me at arm’s length from most of the plot.

I also found some of the translations to be odd, resulting in awkward English phrasings that probably don’t reflect the actual tone of the French original.

Anyway, more comment seems superfluous since I didn’t care for the book and it doesn’t seem to be a commonly-read tome. Next up: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies . And yes, after that, Pale Fire.