The Counterfeiters : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant, lyrical masterpiece.
Review: "The Counterfeiters" (1926), by Andre Gide (1869-1951) is a fascinating chronicle of life in Paris before World War I. It begins as two high school friends, Bernard Profitendieu and Olivier Molinier, prepare for the bacchalaureat, their final exam. Bernard finds some letters hidden at home which show he is illegitimate, and runs away from home, thus setting in motion a rich set of adventures among a cast of mind-boggling proportions. From Bernard, Olivier and their parents, the story quickly grows to include Olivier's younger brother George, his uncle Edouard, Edouard's friend Laura, Olivier's older brother Vincent, Vincent's friend Robert Count Passavant, Passavant's lover Lady Griffith, Edouard's old schoolmate Victor Strouvilhou, Victor's nephew Gheri, Laura's father Vedel, Edouard's old piano teacher Perouse, and Perouse's grandson Boris, among many others. As this prodigious cast assembles itself, the fireworks really begin!

The reader will be amazed by all the ways these characters interconnect with each other. For example, at the beginning of the book, Edouard is traveling from London to Paris to visit and advise Laura, who is trying to extricate herself from an extra-marital affair, but only upon arriving will he learn Laura's paramour is actually his nephew Vincent. Many similar connections between most of the characters will be revealed during the course of this motivating story. "The Counterfeiters" is less a plotted novel than a finely-woven tapestry. Every character interacts with almost every other. The chapters are brief, only a dozen pages or so, but most focus on one of these interactions in particular, making for a compelling narrative. It was notably experimental for its time, but extremely readable, and still fresh today.

The title describes a counterfeiting ring which uses children, like something from Dickens's "Oliver Twist", to pass off gold-plated glass disks for coins. Gide's broader theme, however, is that of falsehood in general, like that popular theme of 19th-century French literature, namely hypocrisy. Beside the counterfeiting ring itself, Gide describes fathers with illegitimate children, adults with hidden affairs, and people generally searching for truth among the artifice of life.

Gide's characters are brilliantly conceived, executed on a par with his predecessor Balzac, whom Gide himself called "possibly our greatest novelist" (as published in the invaluable reference in the appendix of this book, the illuminating journal Gide himself kept while writing "The Counterfeiters"). There is something of Balzac's Goriot in Gide's Perouse, something of Rastignac in Bernard, and perhaps even a little Vautrin in Passavant. But Gide's literary style is markedly different. Where Balzac told self-contained stories, usually ones with social morals attached (as did most 19th-century French authors), Gide tells us he is "fond of sudden endings," and "it is an insult to explain what the attentive reader has understood" (both also paraphrased from this book's appendix).

Gide weaves dozens of strands of the story, intersecting every character with every other character, drawing lines to question the moral behavior of each interaction, an experimental gambit for its time. But I'm pleased to say Gide's experiment worked. The complete book is a brilliant success. His "novelist's novel" is perhaps one of the most important literary results of the early twentieth century, crafting a compelling story of interesting characters, maintaining great intellectual interest throughout. This novel is recommendable to anyone who enjoys fine literature.

Note: Other reviews invariably paint this book in shocking shades of homosexual or hedonistic material, but this is misleading at best. It's true, a homosexual and hedonistic tone appears at places, Count Passavant being the worst offender, but Gide is not a pornographer, he is a moralist. Homosexual himself, Gide was also Protestant (Huguenot), and like his brilliant work "The Immoralist", he believes in showing a moral lesson through human action.

Finally, two small quibbles: An emotional incident at the end of the book, based on a newspaper article Gide clipped, seems incongruous with the rest. It doesn't detract from the book, but it seems tacked on for special effect. Also, while excellent for the most part, the translation insists on leaving some expressions in the French original, such as "chef d'oeuvre" instead of "masterpiece", or "entr'acte" instead of "intermission".

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant, lyrical masterpiece.
Review: "The Counterfeiters" (1926), by Andre Gide (1869-1951) is a fascinating chronicle of life in Paris before World War I. It begins as two high school friends, Bernard Profitendieu and Olivier Molinier, prepare for the bacchalaureat, their final exam. Bernard finds some letters hidden at home which show he is illegitimate, and runs away from home, thus setting in motion a rich set of adventures among a cast of mind-boggling proportions. From Bernard, Olivier and their parents, the story quickly grows to include Olivier's younger brother George, his uncle Edouard, Edouard's friend Laura, Olivier's older brother Vincent, Vincent's friend Robert Count Passavant, Passavant's lover Lady Griffith, Edouard's old schoolmate Victor Strouvilhou, Victor's nephew Gheri, Laura's father Vedel, Edouard's old piano teacher Perouse, and Perouse's grandson Boris, among many others. As this prodigious cast assembles itself, the fireworks really begin!

The reader will be amazed by all the ways these characters interconnect with each other. For example, at the beginning of the book, Edouard is traveling from London to Paris to visit and advise Laura, who is trying to extricate herself from an extra-marital affair, but only upon arriving will he learn Laura's paramour is actually his nephew Vincent. Many similar connections between most of the characters will be revealed during the course of this motivating story. "The Counterfeiters" is less a plotted novel than a finely-woven tapestry. Every character interacts with almost every other. The chapters are brief, only a dozen pages or so, but most focus on one of these interactions in particular, making for a compelling narrative. It was notably experimental for its time, but extremely readable, and still fresh today.

The title describes a counterfeiting ring which uses children, like something from Dickens's "Oliver Twist", to pass off gold-plated glass disks for coins. Gide's broader theme, however, is that of falsehood in general, like that popular theme of 19th-century French literature, namely hypocrisy. Beside the counterfeiting ring itself, Gide describes fathers with illegitimate children, adults with hidden affairs, and people generally searching for truth among the artifice of life.

Gide's characters are brilliantly conceived, executed on a par with his predecessor Balzac, whom Gide himself called "possibly our greatest novelist" (as published in the invaluable reference in the appendix of this book, the illuminating journal Gide himself kept while writing "The Counterfeiters"). There is something of Balzac's Goriot in Gide's Perouse, something of Rastignac in Bernard, and perhaps even a little Vautrin in Passavant. But Gide's literary style is markedly different. Where Balzac told self-contained stories, usually ones with social morals attached (as did most 19th-century French authors), Gide tells us he is "fond of sudden endings," and "it is an insult to explain what the attentive reader has understood" (both also paraphrased from this book's appendix).

Gide weaves dozens of strands of the story, intersecting every character with every other character, drawing lines to question the moral behavior of each interaction, an experimental gambit for its time. But I'm pleased to say Gide's experiment worked. The complete book is a brilliant success. His "novelist's novel" is perhaps one of the most important literary results of the early twentieth century, crafting a compelling story of interesting characters, maintaining great intellectual interest throughout. This novel is recommendable to anyone who enjoys fine literature.

Note: Other reviews invariably paint this book in shocking shades of homosexual or hedonistic material, but this is misleading at best. It's true, a homosexual and hedonistic tone appears at places, Count Passavant being the worst offender, but Gide is not a pornographer, he is a moralist. Homosexual himself, Gide was also Protestant (Huguenot), and like his brilliant work "The Immoralist", he believes in showing a moral lesson through human action.

Finally, two small quibbles: An emotional incident at the end of the book, based on a newspaper article Gide clipped, seems incongruous with the rest. It doesn't detract from the book, but it seems tacked on for special effect. Also, while excellent for the most part, the translation insists on leaving some expressions in the French original, such as "chef d'oeuvre" instead of "masterpiece", or "entr'acte" instead of "intermission".

Rating:
Summary: Unique, Unforgettable
Review: By now I think I've read THE COUNTERFITTERS about five times in perhaps twenty or twenty-five or more years. It is impossible to describe, adequately, in 1,000 words. One can say about it only that it is one of the truly 20th Century novels -- what Gide thought of as a psychological novel -- and has many of the characteristics peculiar to modern 20th Century art. It is daringly erotic; it is asymetrical and does not depend on 'plot;' it is both intensely emotional and very detatched; it is a survey of both personality and character, without benefit of religious or moral cant.

I've picked up this book and begun reading at random any number of times. I've read this book through from cover to cover almost as often, and every time I've picked it up, it has shown me a new side of itself; it has twisted in my mind like a living thing refusing to be trapped. It is a new book every time; an astonishment. A living masterpiece of fiction.

Rating:
Summary: The Counterfeiters: A Courageous, Timeless Classic
Review: If you think that James Dean invented the Rebel without a Cause, read The Counterfeiters. It is easy to see that this book could outrage "cultural conservatives" especially those who never bother to read it but condemn it by its reputation or blurb. On the surface, one may think it is "epater les bourgeois." One could easily call it scandalous in the matter-of-fact treatment of how the younger characters behave amongst themselves and in relation to their elders.

But in the end, the message of this book is highly moral. It is a warning against naivete, complacency and delusions about others and oneself. In our dealings with those we love and care about, we fail to communicate our true feelings and thoughts out of timidity, self-absorption, pride, fear, spite and ignorance. (A good word for one cause of miscommunication that probably is taken from the original French is "pique.") Even the desire to protect the object of our love causes us to lie and hide the truth. Because of our lies and omissions we suffer immeasurably and cause others to suffer.

In a tribute to the power of love, Gide generously grants his best characters the opportunity to redeem themselves. The worst characters remain stagnant behind masks of insincerity or fall into hopeless degradation. Some of the characters in this book are truly evil. They reach a crescendo of depravity made possible by the misplaced good intentions of those who could have stopped them earlier. And one gets the sense, that as in life, even after the most horrid events, the surviving characters will muddle through, some having learned something valuable, others having learned little or nothing.

Rating:
Summary: Ten characters in search of a plot
Review: The title of Andre Gide's _The Counterfeiters_ is derived from one of its character's novel-in-progress about individuals who mask their true feelings for those they care for most. People, instead, choose to hide behind a facade of indifference. Much of Gide's book is taken from entries from a journal kept by Edouard Molinier, the intended novelist. A sub-plot of _The Counterfeiters_ concerns a band of adolescents, one of whom is Edouard's nephew, who are allegedly circulating coins that have a veneer of gold but are in reality worthless. Gide aptly draws a parallel to the human relationships presented in his book. Gide successfully captures the needless agony, with which many of us can perhaps identify, of two people who secretly find joy in the other's company, but wrongly assume, based on surface appearances, that the other person is bored or annoyed with himself. Another character in the book dejectedly leaves home when he discovers that the man whom he has called his father throughout his life was not his natural father. The young man incorrectly assumes that this man never really loved him and would be glad to be rid of him.

Character development is Gide's strong suit in _The Counterfeiters_. Unfortunately, Gide's weak plot development sinks the excellent realization of his characters. Many of the story lines begun by Gide, as reflected in Edouard's journal, are abruptly dropped. One never learns what happens to Edouard's friend Laura in relation to her husband nor to Vincent, Olivier's errant older brother, and the father of Laura's child. The result is that nothing in _The Counterfeiters_ ever comes together or is resolved. Gide chooses to end the book with the suicide of one of its characters. Like several of the other people populating this book, an elderly and despondent relative had misinterpreted the unfortunate adolescent's attitude towards him as indifference. But likening this death to that of Christ dying for his sins is incredibly heavy handed. Nothing that happens in the novel prior to this tragedy prepares the reader to accept such an outlandish conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: "Strip from the novel everything that does not belong to it"
Review: There's no shortage of quality literature, but it's not so often that you find someone who actually seems to be working with the limits of the medium, and stretching them. With this book, Gide did for the novel what people like Lynch and Tarentino have done for film.

'The Counterfeiters' is a novel presumably written by one of its characters, Edouard, who is planning to write a novel titled 'The Counterfeiters,' but is struggling with a case of writer's block. What seems to give him trouble is that the complexity of his experience keeps defying his attempts to apply a scheme of interpretation to it, and a sense of personal crisis which makes it difficult for him to maintain his objectivity as an artist. As a read, though, it isn't half as strange and experimental as that might make it sound; its wide cast of characters is typical of a traditional novel, such as War and Peace or a Tale of Two Cities, but Gide works with incredible subtley behind the scenes. Edouard's musing about the nature of narrative structure (to other characters) is suddenly reflected in his world, as though he were unconsciously God. The themes are tenuous and only gradually developed. Some characters are the ordinary sort of people who began to emerge in the literature of Twain, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, while some are more like the dramatic heroes of Shakespeare and Dickens. There's even a guest appearance by Alfred Jarry, the gleefully profane French dramatist of the period. Halfway through, in a chapter titled 'The Author Stops to Appraise his Characters,' Gide himself (or possibly Eduoard) offers his frank opinions on the characters (or real people?) who populate the novel.

If possible, buy a copy which includes 'The Journals...,' the record that Gide kept while writing this, which provides even more insight into his method.

Rating:
Summary: Lookout - a genius on the run
Review: This is no doubt Andre Gide's best work. Well i haven't read the rest of them really but my friend rea told me so. Anyway - it's an unmatchable pleasure to go through. The novel is very readable and captivating - and yet very intelligent and witty and arouses great thoughts and ideas. The characters are some of the most well rounded beautiful characters i have ever known. While reading this novel i used to walk around in the streets fanticising that i see Bernar or Olivie or Edouar. Oh those dear loveable charcters will always stay dear and close to my heart. Read it!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and breathtaking!
Review: This novel has the misfortune of being neither good or bad. While it may have been somewhat shocking or revolutionary at it's inception, the countefieters struck me as dated. While I respect the authors attempts at embracing larger philiosophical issues, the story just isn't interesting. It is the sort of book that you could put down, not think about, and then come back to three weeks later, and not feel any sense of urgency to get to the last page. But then again, neither do the characters. One of the novels most unfortuate of weaknesses are the long journal entries written by one of the main characters. Reading them, is akin to sitting in a cafe and listening to your most pretentious friend wax poetic about their ephiphanies and relationships, when you really don't care. Moreover, just when it started getting interesting, and I became invested in the characters, it ended.
People who think they should be bored out of their minds reading Nietzchian/postmodernist literature will enjoy it. I know that such literature can be excellent and meaty and entertaining, however, that does not describe the counterfieters. I only finished it so I wouldn't feel guilty seeing it sit on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: Decent novel, but overrated
Review: Three-and-a-half stars. Gide's reputation precedes him. He is generally regarded as one of France's best novelists and is widely admired by American writers as well. I plunged into this novel eagerly and emerged from it, two days later, with little more than a shrug. I hesitate to be too critical about books that I read in translation; one never knows how accurately the translator has captured the original work.

All in all, there's nothing really wrong with The Counterfeiters; it reads and feels at times like Dickens and a spate of other nineteenth-century British novels--the cast of characters is rather large, there are ample doses of melodrama, and the story makes use of several nice "coincidences" to tie otherwise disparate storylines together. It's been said that Gide's style was revolutionary for his day, but it's fair to say that readers today will find it fairly conventional. The same goes for the book's "scandalous" reputation--there is nothing about The Counterfeiters that will shock or amaze readers in 2003 the way it may have in 1926, when it was first published.

That said, The Counterfeiters is a decent book. There are moments when the reader feels that Gide has touched upon something greater than the story itself; some cutting observation about the relationship between Art and Morality, or the decline of social morals. But the material and style is otherwise dated. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading this book, if so inclined. But as for me, six months from now, I'm doubt I'll remember much about it. It just didn't make much of an impression.

Rating:
Summary: Decent novel, but overrated
Review: Three-and-a-half stars. Gide's reputation precedes him. He is generally regarded as one of France's best novelists and is widely admired by American writers as well. I plunged into this novel eagerly and emerged from it, two days later, with little more than a shrug. I hesitate to be too critical about books that I read in translation; one never knows how accurately the translator has captured the original work.

All in all, there's nothing really wrong with The Counterfeiters; it reads and feels at times like Dickens and a spate of other nineteenth-century British novels--the cast of characters is rather large, there are ample doses of melodrama, and the story makes use of several nice "coincidences" to tie otherwise disparate storylines together. It's been said that Gide's style was revolutionary for his day, but it's fair to say that readers today will find it fairly conventional. The same goes for the book's "scandalous" reputation--there is nothing about The Counterfeiters that will shock or amaze readers in 2003 the way it may have in 1926, when it was first published.

That said, The Counterfeiters is a decent book. There are moments when the reader feels that Gide has touched upon something greater than the story itself; some cutting observation about the relationship between Art and Morality, or the decline of social morals. But the material and style is otherwise dated. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading this book, if so inclined. But as for me, six months from now, I'm doubt I'll remember much about it. It just didn't make much of an impression.