From the pen of Andre Gide comes one of the most tedious books ever to shock a nation, although the only shock to this reviewer was in how ninety-nine pages of a Dover Thrift edition could contain so few actual events.
It's inconceivable that The Immoralist wasn't influenced by the likes of Nietzsche and Wilde, yet equally inconceivable that anyone influenced by the likes of Nietzsche and Wilde could create a protagonist so committed to evil in theory and so incapable of doing anything interesting at all in practice.
The tedium that is The Immoralist can't be blamed on it's subject matter. Dostoyevsky, in Notes From Underground, crafts a protagonist obsessed with his own incapacity for action, and manages, both through purely rhetorical self-distortions and through the Underground Man's encounter with a prostitute, to effectively translate his narrator's passivity and duplicity into powerful drama. Leave aside the example, even. It's just astounding that any book about evil could be this uninteresting.
The tedium that is The Immoralist can't be blamed on it's subject matter. Dostoyevsky, in Notes From Underground, crafts a protagonist obsessed with his own incapacity for action, and manages, both through purely rhetorical self-distortions and through the Underground Man's encounter with a prostitute, to effectively translate his narrator's passivity and duplicity into powerful drama. Leave aside the example, even. It's just astounding that any book about evil could be this uninteresting.
How to Define "Evil"? - The Immoralist?
Evil, by its very definition, is the inversion of established order, the destruction of the rules, and anyone who's seen a heist movie or read a Russian novel knows that when order descends into chaos--even at the level of someone breaking a window or breaking a heart--the results always at least provoke a moment's glance, at least some basic stimulation of the faculty to wonder, to re-orient oneself in the absence of what has been, just moments before, the rules we relied on.
Part of the reason Immoralist fails to be interesting is its inability either to establish any rules to break or effectively to break them. Based on the opening scene, the book seems promising enough as a portrait of evil: the lifelong friends of young Michel, once a rising, sober academic, go to visit him in the Algerian village where he now lives, idle and given over entirely to pederasty and excess. The rest of The Immoralist is presented as Michel's first-hand account of how he got from there to here, from virtue to vice. The transformation seems remarkable, and one that should, by any criterion, take the reader on an interesting journey.
Evil, by its very definition, is the inversion of established order, the destruction of the rules, and anyone who's seen a heist movie or read a Russian novel knows that when order descends into chaos--even at the level of someone breaking a window or breaking a heart--the results always at least provoke a moment's glance, at least some basic stimulation of the faculty to wonder, to re-orient oneself in the absence of what has been, just moments before, the rules we relied on.
Part of the reason Immoralist fails to be interesting is its inability either to establish any rules to break or effectively to break them. Based on the opening scene, the book seems promising enough as a portrait of evil: the lifelong friends of young Michel, once a rising, sober academic, go to visit him in the Algerian village where he now lives, idle and given over entirely to pederasty and excess. The rest of The Immoralist is presented as Michel's first-hand account of how he got from there to here, from virtue to vice. The transformation seems remarkable, and one that should, by any criterion, take the reader on an interesting journey.
Where Do We Go? - The Immoralist
More to Gide's shame, then, that although The Immoralist is dominated by Michel's literal journey, that journey fails to be anything more than travel: Michel's shuffling from seldom-described place to seldom-described place. And somewhere among train journeys, a setup that promises a faithful portrait of a slow degeneration crams all of its actual events into the first and last ten pages of the book.
Michel's transformation is sparked when he and his young wife (toward whom he has an ambiguous but ultimately genial attitude) begin traveling throughout Northern Africa in order to allow Michel to perform the archaeological research and observation necessary for his burgeoning academic career. Michel falls gravely ill to the point of near-death, and based on this develops a fanatical (at least nominally fanatical) interest in life. Once he recovers, he begins to act on this fanatical interest in life in a myriad of dreadful ways.
More to Gide's shame, then, that although The Immoralist is dominated by Michel's literal journey, that journey fails to be anything more than travel: Michel's shuffling from seldom-described place to seldom-described place. And somewhere among train journeys, a setup that promises a faithful portrait of a slow degeneration crams all of its actual events into the first and last ten pages of the book.
Michel's transformation is sparked when he and his young wife (toward whom he has an ambiguous but ultimately genial attitude) begin traveling throughout Northern Africa in order to allow Michel to perform the archaeological research and observation necessary for his burgeoning academic career. Michel falls gravely ill to the point of near-death, and based on this develops a fanatical (at least nominally fanatical) interest in life. Once he recovers, he begins to act on this fanatical interest in life in a myriad of dreadful ways.
What ways, you ask? For one, he begins sunbathing in the nude. For another, he looks, lingeringly, at a number of small Arab boys, brought to his house by his wife to play. He begins to doubt--yes, to doubt!--his academic career. If these sound underwhelming as the first steps into evil, they're doubly so when parceled out to the reader, slowly, across sixty-some pages of text, and for most of the novel, Marcel's degeneration does not translate often, if ever, into action. It doesn't even translate into a good description of an Arab boy.
