Alain-Fournier

Frank Wilson first mentioned Alain-Fournier's Lost Estate to me years ago. I know it's one of his favorites, and having recently finished the book, I agree: here's a superb meditation on Europe before the war, and a hint, a glimmer, of all that was lost. 

At its core, The Lost Estate is a book about memory and our pursuit of things past. Alain-Fournier's characters - the majority of them children - are motivated by this pursuit, by a sense in which lost love, especially, might be recovered. Hanging over the novel is a magical quality, one that's delicate and rather like a dream.

For me, The Lost Estate was reminiscent of a number of books, some written around the same time, others published later. Because of its title alone (Le Grand Meaulnes), there's the obvious connection with Fitzgerald's Gatsby and its pursuit - in some sense - of original love. Further, there's the parallel in terms of personalities: both Gatsby and Meaulnes project a magnetism in which other find themselves impossibly ensnared. 

I thought, too, of Brideshead, both in Alain-Fournier's willingness to let his characters languish and fade, and in the importance assigned by both authors (Waugh and Alain-Fournier) to place, to the mythical countryside. Brideshead functions as the lost estate does: as a center of gravity, as the place to which all characters are bound - inevitably - to return. It's there that fantasy lurks. 

The Lost Estate is not a perfect book, and the final section focused around Meaulnes' diary seemed a bit of a stretch. But the remainder of the novel is an evocative, often heart-rending meditation on the promises we make while young, and our attempts to keep them, to see them through, to satisfy an earlier version of ourselves in the face of adventure and maturity. 

Alain-Fournier was twenty-six when The Lost Estate was published (and twenty-eight when he was killed at the start of the First World War). For me, that makes his book all the more impressive - and all the more tragic: here's a novel about youth, written in masterful fashion, by someone who's only just emerged from the very experience of youth. Alain-Fournier's observations are crisp and poetic, without reaching for too much; his pursuit of what's lost - Yvonne, above all - is tinged with a competing sense of sorrow and promise.  

Out of respect, the last word is reserved for him:

"What I like about you," wrote Alain-Fournier, "are my memories."