Dear Counterfeiters readers,

I’m looking forward to our May read-along of The Counterfeiters by André Gide, the ‘greatest French writer’ of the Twentieth Century according to his New York Times obituary in 1951. We’ll read it over six weeks, starting next Friday 2 May. All the details are here.

Before we get started, here is a little about André Gide’s life.

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After a somewhat puritanical upbringing, André Gide visited North Africa in the 1890s, where he met Oscar Wilde and discovered the pleasures of beautiful Arabic boys. He became a self-declared pederast and much of his work reflects a lifelong conflict between austere Protestant values and transgressive sexuality.

In 1895 he married his cousin Madeleine, but their marriage was never consummated. He also embarked on his literary career. Today, he is best remembered for three of his early books.

Fruits of the Earth (1897) is a curious mixture of poetry, quotation, travelogue and memoir, addressed to an imaginary young man called Nathaniel. Inspired by Gide’s sexual awakening in North Africa, it is a hymn to pleasure and living in the moment.

The Immoralist (1902) is a shocking, semi-autobiographical fiction in which a newly married couple, Michel and Marceline, travel to Tunisia on their honeymoon. Whilst there, Michel is captivated by a beautiful Arab boy and renounces his moral values, deciding to live only according to his desires. With this newfound freedom, however, comes a sickening ennui.

Strait is the Gate (1909), which Gide described as ‘the twin’ of The Immoralist, is about Jerome Palissier, who spends his summers in Normandy. He falls in love with his cousin Alissa and she initially returns his love, but gradually comes to believe that her soul is being compromised, so she crushes her feelings.

Gide wrote more than fifty books, including poetry, biography, fiction, drama, criticism, travelogues and translations of Joseph Conrad. In 1918, he met the author Dorothy Bussy, who became a lifelong friend and translated many of his works into English.

In 1925 he wrote The Counterfeiters, the first and only one of his books that he described as a novel, and in 1947, towards the end of his life, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight’.

‘My writings are comparable to Achilles’ spear,’ wrote Gide, ‘with which a second contact cured those it had first wounded. If one of my books disconcerts you, reread it. Under the obvious poison, I took care to hide the antidote.’

I look forward to starting Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters next week.

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