4.5 stars for French excellence.

A charity shop gem that completely took me by surprise! Alain-Fournier has enchanted me. The Lost Estate was the first time in quite a while where I felt compelled to continue reading and regretted needing to step away from the story momentarily to attend to life's demands. Its beginning has a Narnia-like wonder and fantastical air, which I loved. A schoolboy who becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon a decadent feast in a mysterious location, spotting the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and then desperately attempts to return to this place? I was hooked. The ending lost my interest slightly as the novel begins to prioritize the realistic over its prior fantastical elements (the strange boy with the bandaged face! the nighttime mob outside the house! the wedding festivities! the circus!), and the conclusion is, well, very appropriately and tragically French. Simone de Beauvoir's "The Woman Destroyed" is still fresh on my mind, and there are some thematic links.

Taylor has been a good friend and already heard me rave about this, but it's SO good. Books like this truly make me lament how few of the texts included in high school and college curricula are texts in translation. Even as an English major, opportunities for such reading are pretty scarce and often limited by faculty specialties. I want to experience the whole world through stories!

A beautiful, evocative story of innocence and adolescence set in rural France in the 1890s. This early 20th-century classic follows the narrator François's friendship and fascination with The Great Meaulnes, a school friend whose life turns into a romantic quest after he stumbles upon a dilapidated chateau and the brother and sister who live there.

A unique personal tale of discovery.

Tried getting into this, but just didn't care enough about it to keep going. I find coming of age stories to be very hit and miss, and this was definitely a miss for me. I haven't ever been tempted to pick it up again, and it was one that was highly recommended and I wanted to like.

I went into this book without any preconceived notions. I had no idea what it was about, but had seen that one of my friends had finished it and liked the picture on the cover. I always felt there was some danger lurking around the corner but I was fairly, but not quite sure that it wasn't a ghost story. Perhaps that is the best way to read it.

Afterwards I found out that that the author was killed on one of the bloody battlefields of The Great War and was touched and saddened by the poignancy of that. Here is the wikipedia article about the author:

"Alain-Fournier was born in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, in the Cher département, in central France, the son of a school teacher. He studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris, where he prepared for the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure, but without success. He then studied at the merchant marine school in Brest. At the Lycée Lakanal he met Jacques Rivière, and the two became close friends. In 1909, Rivière married Alain-Fournier's younger sister Isabelle.

He interrupted his studies in 1907 and from 1908 to 1909 he performed his military service. At this time he published some essays, poems and stories which were later collected and re-published under the name Miracles.

Throughout this period he was mulling over what would become his celebrated novel, Le Grand Meaulnes. On the first of June 1905, Ascension day, while he was taking a stroll along banks of the Seine he had met Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quiévrecourt, with whom he became deeply enamoured. The two spoke, but he did not manage to win her favours. The following year on the same day he waited for her at the same place, but she did not appear. That night he told Rivière, "She did not come. And even if she had, she would not have been the same". They did not meet again until eight years later, when she was married with two children. Yvonne de Quiévrecourt would become Yvonne de Galais in his novel.

He returned to Paris in 1910 and became a literary critic, writing for the Paris-Journal. There he met André Gide and Paul Claudel. In 1912, he quit his job to become the personal assistant of the politician Casimir Perrier. Le Grand Meaulnes was finished in early 1913, and was first published in the Nouvelle Revue Française (from July to October 1913), and then as a book. Le Grand Meaulnes was nominated for, but did not win, the Prix Goncourt. It is available in English in a widely admired 1959 translation by Frank Davison for Oxford University Press under the title The Lost Domain.

In 1914, Alain-Fournier started work on a second novel, Colombe Blanchet, but this remained unfinished when he joined the Army as a lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-lès-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on 22 September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, at which time he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne.

Most of the writing of Alain-Fournier was published posthumously: Miracles (a volume of poems and essays) in 1924, his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 and his letters to his family in 1930. His notes and sketches for Colombe Blanchet have also been published."

This book was stunning, leaving me with more questions than answers, and it's the kind of book I would like to read again sometime.