Henri Alain-Fournier

Grand Meaulnes

Lost Estate

Il grande Meaulnes

Design your own cover - My Penguin is simple, we print the words, you do the covers. What will you do? Remember you can draw, paint, scribble or scratch to make your mark on My Penguin. Frame it, read it, give it as a gift or hide it away on a shelf at home. That cover is naked. Put something on it! When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when he disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girl hidden within it, Meaulnes has been changed forever. In his restless search for the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Franccedilois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through a moving portrayal of vanished adolescence.

Design Your Own Cover!

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girl hidden within it, he has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier’s compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

Unabridged text

Le grand Meaulnes

John Fowles described Le Grand Meaulnes as a novel that 'has haunted the European mind since it first appeared in 1913. It is a novel one never quite forgets, a book like a secret garden...' Le Grand Meaulnes is a story of the end of youth, with its sense of wonder and idealism, and the transition to adulthood and experience. In a story which exquisitely blends realism with a hint of fantasy, Augustin Meaulnes is haunted by the memory of a beautiful girl briefly encountered in a fantastic 'domain'. However, Meaulnes finds himself unable to return there both physically and emotionally. An acknowledged modern classic, Le Grand Meaulnes is offered here in a new translation which is more sympathetic to the poetic original than previous editions. It also adds the first English translation of the poems and prose collection, Miracles. 'Poetic...has clearly been undertaken with affection.' Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement.

Le Grand Meaulnes and Miracles

Alain-Fournier’s poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses – and young love reaching out ‘in the frightening dark, with timid fingers’. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier’s verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.

Henri Alain-Fournier

About

Books

Join the club