Monday, August 3, 2009

The Immoralist, Andre Gide

I picked up The Immoralist a few years ago at the Brown Elephant and have been looking forward to reading it for a while. It was published in France in 1902, and was extremely controversial for what the back of my Penguin classic edition deems its "frank defense of homosexuality." A short novel, The Immoralist is narrated by its protagonist in the form of a monologue to the narrator's friends. I expected it to be much more thrilling that it turned out to be, but I suppose that is the fault of the time at which it was published. Still, it didn't engage me; it felt dry and monotonous. I should have known that if Gide published it and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1947, it wasn't going to be any Queer as Folk. One can always hope...

No comments:

Post a Comment