Okay, so I decided to put my rusty French skills to the test today. Well, not so much to the test as to some use. I decided I'd rather start with something that looked easy. Luckily it was, for the most part. Gide's sentence structure is easy to follow and the vocabulary is pretty standard.
As to the story... Oh boy. If I had grown up French, I'm sure I would have known what this was about before reading it. As an ignorant American, however, I had the very dubious pleasure of discovering that this is a story about a middle-aged pastor who falls in love with a blind girl he makes his ward.
HELLA AWK. Seriously, when I got to the entries for May 19th, I WTFOL (WTF'd out loud). I definitely do not approve.
I also thought most of the characters were pretty annoying from the beginning; they seemed to me more the simple, blissfully ignorant sort that are often in 19th century literature than the complex, deeply reflective characters that emerged more in the 20th century (the book was written in 1919). But I have to take into account the fact that the story is written from the perspective of the pastor, as though he was writing in a journal, so he may be simply filtering his interactions with others through his simple perspective.
This is worth reading if you are studying French; it's good practice and the dialogue breaks up the prose well. Definitely not a light, fun read though. The ending is...well, I was actually happier with that than with the beginning and middle, but it's not a happy ending. And the themes are so transparent...You may as well just read the cliff notes, if they exist.
~6/10~
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