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Translation could be better -- the prose is clunky and dull, which I suspect has little to do with the skills of Gide and more to do with whoever rendered it into English. Style-wise it's poor man's Balzac. Again, this probably does not have anything to do with Gide's writing; my copy of The Immoralist is much better in this regard, which was translated by Richard Howard, whereas this one is translated by Dorothy Bussy.

The plot is fine and engaging, complicated with overlapping storylines in the typical way for nineteenth century novels with the added "modernist" conceit of having various letters, journal entries, etc. to hammer home the objectification of the self by the self for the self alongside the objectification of the self by the self for others. Which is all well and good, but seems to me more an extension of what Balzac, Flaubert, and Gide himself were doing beforehand. But I also don't read French.

Because this dual self-characterization is, if I may be pardoned for sounding cliche, more relevant than ever with the advent of social media and the like, I am not sure whether this book is prescient or rendered irrelevant by the very social forces it was critiquing. I am not sure which is the case, which is good.

The issue arises when the prose translation is so terribly dull that I lose interest in the actually fascinating stuff going on in the plot of

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