Up till now - as is right - my tastes, my feelings, my personal experiences have all gone to feed my writings; in my best contrived phrases I still felt the beating of my heart. But henceforth the link is broken between what I think and what I feel. And I wonder whether this impediment which prevents my heart from speaking is not the real cause that is driving my work into abstraction and artificiality.
Essentially, the novel is an account of the doings and entanglements of a number of middle-to-upper class types, many of them schoolboys, in between-the-wars Paris (it was published in 1925, the same year as Mrs Dalloway across the channel, and a year before The Great Gatsby emerged on the other side of the Atlantic). Their relations to each other are complex in more than one sense (I had to stop and draw myself a character map about a third of the way through in order to keep track of who everyone was and how they were connected to everyone else, and in so doing realised how little it did justice to the intricacies and subtleties of those relations), and most are of a pronouncedly literary bent, being writers, editors, and so on. Even those who aren't directly implicated with literature and the arts are very much 'literary' characters, being prone to introspection, abstraction of thought, fluidity of expression and extended disquisitions...in other words, just the sorts who I like, in literature and in life.
The street where Bernard Profitendieu had lived until then was quite close to the Luxembourg Gardens. There, in the path that overlooks the Medici fountains, some of his schoolfellows were in the habit of meeting, every Wednesday afternoon, between four and six. The talk was of art, philosophy, sport, politics and literature. [...] Every one of them, as soon as he was in company with the others, lost his naturalness and began to act a part.
While centre stage is initially occupied by Bernard and Olivier, Olivier's uncle Edouard soon assumes a pivotal position in the novel's overall scheme. Edouard is a writer, and we have access to his thoughts through extracts from his notebooks; moreover, it turns out that he's writing a novel called 'The Counterfeiters' and is given to lengthy excursions on the subject not only of that novel, but of art in general...très metafictional.
'My poor dear friend, you will make your readers die of boredom,' said Laura; as she could no longer hide her smile, she had made up her mind to laugh outright.
'Not at all. In order to arrive at this effect - do you follow me? - I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book, if you must have one, is just that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it.'
'Yes, yes; I'm beginning to see,' said Sophroniska politely, though Laura's laugh was very near conquering her. 'But you know it's always dangerous to represent intellectuals in novels. The public is bored by them; one only manages to make them say absurdities and they give an air of abstraction to everything they touch.'
'And then I see exactly what will happen,' cried Laura; 'in this novel of yours you won't be able to help painting yourself.'
The counterfeiters of the title of Gide's novel are, on one level, the makers and schoolboy passers of counterfeit coins whose activities, both with the false coinage and with the institution of a rather seedy quasi-brothel frequented exclusively by these privileged children of pillars of society (both Bernard's and Olivier's fathers are eminent jurists; the contrast between that profession and the activities of some of their children and childrens' schoolfellows is surely intentional), form one thread of the story. But one is also led to wonder whether all the characters of the novel are engaged in a more figurative passing of false coin - of being counterfeiters - through everyday hypocrisy, failures of understanding or imagination, excessive artifice, excessive self-denial, and in countless other ways. And, as is made explicit in the comments of the cynical Strouvilhou near the end, also at stake is the question of the status of art (including, presumably, The Counterfeiters itself), which is where the metafictionality becomes doubly important:
' [...] We live upon nothing but feelings which have been taken for granted once for all and which the reader imagines he experiences, because he believes everything he sees in print; the author builds on this as he does on the conventions which he believes to be the foundations of his art. These feelings ring as false as counters, but they pass current. And as everyone knows that "bad money drives out good", a man who should offer the public real coins would seem to be defrauding us. [...]'
So all of this of course took my fancy, especially when presented in prose so sharp and unsparing (and sometimes very witty), and with its characters continually falling into a series of unfortunate relationships with one another, of variously assumed, obscure and hinted-at characters (there's more than a whiff of pederasty to many of the interactions), and also carrying on this whirl of erudite, elegant, and often rather cutting conversations, sometimes scoring points off one another, sometimes floundering in a sea of mutual misunderstandings and things left unspoken (most notably between Olivier and Edouard)...it actually put me rather in mind of The Secret History, even though they're quite different novels in many ways.
I've just noticed that, in pecking out these impressions, I have, as is my wont, emphasised the 'literary' aspects of the novel over its more 'human' or 'natural' elements (say, to do with character and plot!), but I think that this is a kind of reading which is positively invited by The Counterfeiters - I mean, it even has a chapter entitled 'The Author Reviews His Characters'...it's also difficult to pin down because it refuses to focus on any one of its individual characters in any conventional way, often disposing of them or raising them to sudden prominence rather peremptorily. Anyhow, there was more that I wanted to say about The Counterfeiters but, as with every book that I really like, it'd be futile to attempt an exhaustive recapitulation/excavation of my responses to it - and so instead I'll leave off here.
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Edit [16/2/06]: Thoughts on the ending here.
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Top 14 favourite novels first read in 2005, in order (14 because that's how many have really stuck with me):
1. Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World - Haruki Murakami
2. To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
4. The Counterfeiters - André Gide [I'm including this one because: (a) I was a fair way into it by the time the new year rolled over; and (b) it feels so much like an '05 book in terms of my personal history]
5. The Master And Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
6. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
7. A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
8. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
9. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
10. South Of The Border, West Of The Sun - Haruki Murakami
11. Fear And Trembling - Amélie Nothomb
12. Lord Malquist & Mr Moon - Tom Stoppard
13. Beloved - Toni Morrison
14. Love & Friendship - Alison Lurie
