Le Grand Meaulnes revisited, Julian Barnes says something what with I whole heartedly agree:
The novel is many things – magical, high-hearted, improbable, coincidence-ridden, operatic – yet never sentimental, because it is true to what we remember about adolescence, with all its hopes and fears and impossible dreams. What surprised me about the novel this time round was how intensely literary it is. Fournier, while still discovering how to write, said determinedly that: “I shan’t be truly myself as long as I have a single bookish phrase in my head.” This certainly holds at the level of style – he writes in an easy, intimate, rather hesitant speaking voice – but a wider bookishness is omnipresent.
© Henning Bertram 2025