Lafcadio's Adventures - A Novel

Zusatztext “A joy to read. It is beautifully articulated and superbly written. . . . A glorious and satisfying ‘thriller.’ ” — The New York Times “In a time of intellectual inflation! . . . Gide’s survival can help us to distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit. . . . There is nothing like the real thing.” — The New Republic “Full of gusto. . . . The imagination works freely and the plot marches boldly ahead! galloping through the most preposterous situations without breaking its neck.” — New York Herald Tribune Informationen zum Autor André Gide was born in Paris in 1869 and died there in 1951. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. His works include The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters, Strait is the Gate , the autobiography If It Die . . . , and three volumes of Journals . He also wrote plays, essays, short stories, and books of travel. Klappentext Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate André Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime. When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he's heir to an ailing French nobleman's fortune, he's seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio—one of the most original creations in all modern fiction—goes free.BOOK I: ANTHIME ARMAND-DUBOIS " Pour ma part, mon choix est fait. J'ai opte pour l'atheisme social. Cet atheisme, je l'ai exprime depuis une quinzaine d'annees, dans une serie d'ouvrages . . . ." --GEORGES PALANTE. Chronique philosophique du Mercure de France (December, 1912). I In 1890, during the pontificate of Leo XIII, Anthime Armand-Dubois, unbeliever and freemason, visited Rome in order to consult Dr. X, the celebrated specialist for rheumatic complaints. "What!" cried Julius de Baraglioul, his brother-in-law. "Is it your body you are going to treat in Rome? Pray Heaven you may realise when you get there that your soul is in far worse case." To which Armand-Dubois replied in a tone of excessive commiseration: "My poor dear fellow, just look at my shoulders." Baraglioul was obliging; he raised his eyes and glanced, in spite of himself, at his brother-in-law's shoulders; they were quivering spasmodically as though laughter, deep-seated and irrepressible, were heaving them; and the sight of this huge half-crippled frame spending the last remnants of its physical strength in so absurd a parody, was pitiable enough. Well, well! They had taken up their positions once and for all. Baraglioul's eloquence wouldn't change matters. Time perhaps? Or the secret influence of holy surroundings? . . . Julius merely said in an infinitely discouraged manner: "Anthime, you grieve me." (The shoulders stopped quivering at once, for Anthime was fond of his brother-in-law.) "When I go to see you in Rome three years hence; at the time of the Jubilee, I trust I may find you amended!" Veronica, at any rate, accompanied her husband in a very different frame of mind. She was as pious as her sister Marguerite and as Julius himself, and this long stay in Rome was the fulfilment of one of her dearest wishes. She was a disappointed, barren woman who filled her monotonous life with trivial, religious observances and, for lack of a child, devoted herself to nursing her spiritual aspirations. S...

Product details

• Authors: Andre Gide
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.05.2003
• EAN: 9780375713385
• ISBN: 978-0-375-71338-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 203 mm x 16 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature