Word: gide
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This was hardly the passing of a literary giant, though at various times Jean Cocteau, Henry Miller, C.P. Snow, and Andre Gide each admired Simenon's slick perfection of the roman policier genre. Yet it was a curious change for a man in his seventies, a change made still more curious in the next year by the sale of his estates, the disruption of his supremely sedate life, and the abandoning of his ordered creative habits. Something new in his writing seemed to be in the offing; like one of those inconsistencies that pop up so frequently in his novels...
Through the entire book, there is the elusive suggestion of momentous questions, of Oedipal relations, of age, of the child's world, of death. We should take a clue from Gide: to be able to read Simenon with interest is to read between the lines, to make a creative extrapolation. By itself, Letter to My Mother is the maudlin nostalgia of an old man; however, with a bit of imagination on the reader's part, the roman policier mentality can be the catalyst to other, more serious reflections...
...article on France's current medal mania [Jan. 12] reminded me of André Gide's observation that by middle age all Frenchmen acquire two things: gonorrhea and the Légion d'Honneur...
...balmy days of a more gentle season. But alas, the streets bear the scars of the ravages of snowstorms, the trees scream in their gnarled bareness, the clouds continue to obscure the fulgent sunshine. Cambridge does not easily shake the remnants of its most brutal season. We become like Gide's immoralist, neglecting our careers, our families, and our lovers in a hedonistic hearkening to a brighter clime and sunnier shore, where mind and body can relax and regenerate...
...only to Proust. But despite all those reviews in the Observer and then the Sunday Times of London, he was not primarily a critic. He was always being something less or something more: a gossip, an anecdotist or, more often, an essayist. Here he is, taking off from the Gide-Paul Valery letters: "Letters are most alive when freshly delivered in the sender's handwriting, something perishes when they are typed, more when they are printed, most of all when they are translated. Finally we are left with a well-pressed flower from the original blossom, a silent film...