Henri Alain-Fournier - The Lost Estate [Le Grand Meaulnes] (Penguin Classics, 2007).  Translated by Robin Buss with an Introduction by Adam Gopnick.

ISBN: 9780141441894 | 256 pages | EPUB & MOBI


THE LOST ESTATE [Le Grand Meaulnes] (1913) is the only novel by French author HENRI ALAIN-FOURNIER (1886-1914).

Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love.  Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.  Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

This new translation by Robin Buss sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style.


Review

"I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page.  I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then." -- Nick Hornby